Isospin-forbidden electric dipole transition of the 9.64 MeV state of $^{12}$C

The electric dipole transition of the 3$^-$ state at 9.64 MeV of $^{12}$C to the 2$^+$ state at 4.44 MeV is speculated to play a key role in the triple-$\alpha$ reaction at high temperatures. A theoretical prediction of its transition width is a challenge to nuclear theory because it belongs to a class of isospin-forbidden transitions. We extend a microscopic 3$\alpha$ cluster-model to include isospin 1 impurity components, and take into account both isovector and isoscalar electirc dipole operators. Several sets of $2^+$ and $3^-$ wave functions are generated by solving a radius-constrained equation of motion with the stochastic variational method, resulting in reproducing very well the electric quadrupole and octupole transition probabilities to the ground state. The electric dipole transition width is found to be 7--31 meV, 16 meV on the average, and more than half of the width is contributed by the isospin mixing of $\alpha$ particles.
Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures