Abstract
A new mechanism is proposed to describe the transfer reactions that lead to heavy actinides by assuming that the clusters produced by the fragmentation of a projectile are captured as a whole by the target nucleus. Neutron emission from the resulting excited nuclei is also considered. The predictions of the model are compared with and succeed in explaining the data obtained for the reactions induced by a given projectile (18O) on various targets and for the heavier system 238U+248Cm.