In this article, the authors reanalyze the possibility to obtain a 12C from the reactions of three alphas using the TDHF approach. As mentioned by the authors, such studies were already made in the past, the novelty here being the consideration of a two-step process and the method to extract the excited state energy. Some of the result are interesting and I understand that the present article is an intermediate step towards more systematic studies.
I have a few comments that the authors might consider:
1) It is not clear in general if the HF/TDHF approach can describe light systems such as alpha particles or carbon. Can the authors give the ground state energy of these two nuclei obtained at the HF level and also compare with experiments? This would give an indirect hint on the precision one could achieve on energies.
2) Regarding the sentence “The centre of mass collision energy is fixed at Ecm = 2.0 MeV.”.
Can the authors motivate physically their choice of energy? If the authors have made tests with different energy, a comment on how the peaks obtained from the spectral analysis depends on the beam energy might be of interest.
3) Another delicate issue is that one usually discuss the formation of the 12C to the Hoyle state that has a definite spin. TDHF simulation leads to a final state which is a combination of different spins. Isolating a given spin can be made with some effort by projecting on total spins at the intermediate and/or final time. Another way would be to use the approximate relation between initial impact parameter and final internal spin. I am not asking the authors to solve this issue, but maybe a comment on this might enrich the article.
4) As a final remark, there are numerous misprints in the text that should be corrected in the final version. I collected some of them in the text: analsis, tracjectory, multinucles, resononance, calcualtion, lablled…
As I say above, the calculations are of interest and deserve to be published. I hope the authors will however follow some of my recommendation to improve the manuscript.
