Background: Heavy-ion induced two-nucleon transfer reactions are powerful tools to reveal peculiar aspects of the atomic nucleus, such as pairing correlations, single-particle and collective degrees of freedom, and more. Also, these processes are in competition with the direct meson exchange in the double charge exchange reactions, which have recently attracted great interest due to their possible connection to neutrinoless double-β decay. In this framework, the exploration of two-nucleon transfer reactions in the 20 Ne + 116 Cd collision at energies above the Coulomb barrier is particularly relevant since the 116 Cd nucleus is a candidate for the double-β decay.Purpose: We want to analyze selected transitions to low-lying 0 + and 2 + states of the residual nuclei in the 116 Cd( 20 Ne, 22 Ne) 114 Cd two-neutron pickup and 116 Cd( 20 Ne, 18 O) 118 Sn two-proton stripping reactions at 306 MeV incident energy and determine the role of the couplings with inelastic transitions. Methods: We measured the excitation energy spectra and absolute cross sections for the two reactions using the MAGNEX large acceptance magnetic spectrometer to detect the ejectiles. We performed direct coupled reaction channels and sequential distorted wave Born approximation calculations using the double folding São Paulo potential to model the initial and final state interactions. The spectroscopic amplitudes for two-and singleparticle transitions were derived by different nuclear structure approaches: microscopic large-scale shell model, interacting boson model-2 and quasiparticle random phase approximation.
Results:The calculations are able to reproduce the experimental cross sections for both two-neutron and twoproton transfer reactions. The role of couplings with the inelastic channels are found to be important in the two-proton transfer case. A competition between the direct and the sequential process is found in the reaction *