Existing data for 11B+13,14C elastic and inelastic scattering at Elab (11B) = 45 MeV, as well
as new data for the 13C(11B,10B)14C reaction for transitions populating the ground state of 14C
and the ground plus first four excited states of 10B, were analysed using the coupled-channels (CC)
and coupled-reaction-channels (CRC) methods. A recently proposed energy dependent optical
model (OM) potential for carbon isotopes, consisting of Woods-Saxon (WS) form real volume
and imaginary volume plus surface components, applied successfully to OM analyses of scattering
from mid-mass (A > 27) and heavy target nuclei, was used to generate the distorted waves in
the entrance and exit channels. The data analysed in this work cover the whole angular range,
enabling the most important reaction mechanisms leading to the production of nuclei in the exit
reaction channels to be established. For these light boron + carbon systems, a reasonable fit to
both scattering and reaction data over the full angular range required some modification of the
parameters of the OM potential extracted from the energy-dependent carbon systematics: omission
of the surface imaginary part and a slight increase in the radius of the real part. Inclusion of a
sufficient number of inelastic channels in a CC analysis of the 11B+13,14C elastic scattering was
shown to be important at mid-range scattering angles, while for the 13C(11B,10B)14C reaction
inclusion of neutron transfers from low-lying excited states of 11B was required to give good overall
agreement between the CRC calculations and the data. We suggest the analytical form of the
global carbon OM potential may benefit from an additional parameterization of the radius of the
real part and the depth of the surface imaginary part, dependent on the target mass number, to
give better applicability to the analysis of scattering from light target nuclei.