  The core excitation, being an important reaction mechanism, so far is not
properly included in most calculations of three-body nuclear reactions. We aim
to include the excitation of the core nucleus using an exact Faddeev-type
framework for nuclear reactions in the three-body (core + neutron + proton)
system. We employ Alt, Grassberger, and Sandhas (AGS) integral equations for
the three-particle transition operators and solve them in the momentum-space
framework. The Coulomb interaction is included via the method of screening and
renormalization. We calculate elastic, inelastic, and transfer reactions
involving 10Be and 24Mg nuclear cores. Important effects of the core excitation
are found, often improving the description of the experimental data. In the
neutron transfer reactions the core excitation effect is by far not just a
simple reduction of the cross section by the respective spectroscopic factor.
This indicates that widely used extraction of the spectroscopic factors from
the ratio of the experimental and theoretical transfer cross sections is
unreliable approach.
