Heavy-ion collisions at near-barrier energies provide a crucial pathway for investigating nucleon correlations and clustering structures. Recent experimental results showed that the valence neutrons in light projectiles obviously enhance the $\alpha$ transfer. This finding is extremely puzzling and fascinating, because it violates the ground-state $Q$ value systematics unexpectedly. In this work, the time-dependent Hartree-Fock approach is utilized to investigate the cluster transfer. By comparing the reactions ${}^{12,14}\mathrm{C}+{}^{209}\mathrm{Bi}$, we discover that above puzzling behavior is because of the strong correlation between isospin diffusion and clustering. Our calculations clearly show that the equilibrium of neutron-to-proton ratio strongly inhibits the clustering. This work opens a prospect for investigating the clustering in an open quantum system.

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• Heavy-ion reaction mechanisms
• Low & intermediate energy heavy-ion reactions
• Nuclear density functional theory
• Transfer reactions