Carbon burning plays a pivotal role in the late-stage evolution of massive stars and the conditions

of certain supernovae. The complexity of carbon burning can be described by quantum

phenomena, such as quantum tunnelling and nuclear molecular states. Quantum dynamical

methods are presented to demonstrate the importance of treating specific alignments and

nucleon-nucleon interactions in the ¹²C + ¹²C reaction. We incorporate a microscopic model,

time-dependent Hartree-Fock, with the time-dependent wavepacket method to ascertain the role

of nucleon-nucleon interactions upon the fusion cross-section of the ¹²C + ¹²C reaction. The

density-constrained time-dependent Hartree-Fock method enables us to take advantage of the

dynamic effects seen in the microscopic model, in the form of extracted ion-ion potentials, and

implement them into the time-dependent wavepacket method. Specifically treating all alignments

in the system, we are able to better predict the location of resonant structures associated

with nuclear molecular states compared to other macroscopic implementations. Exploiting the

microscopic method further we can explore low-energy regions of the cross-section associated

with excitations of the compound nucleus, ²⁴Mg. Through the analysis of multipole giant resonance

calculations we probed into the early continuum of the multipole giant resonance regions

to explain the expected resonances believed to occupy the Gamow window of this reaction. To

ascertain the role of alpha clustered exit partitions on ¹²C + ¹²C fusion, the ²⁰Ne + ⁴He and ¹⁶O

+ ⁸Be exit partitions were included in an approach inspired by coupled-channels. By applying

different coupling schemes we show the effects coupled-partitions have on the direct component

of the fusion cross-section.