XXXIX Symposium on Nuclear Physics

In the present volume of Journal of Physics: Conference Series we publish the proceedings of the "XXXIX Symposium on Nuclear Physics", that was held from January 5-8, 2016 at the Hacienda Cocoyoc, Morelos, Mexico. The proceedings consist of 20 contributions that were presented as plenary talks at the meeting. The abstracts of all contributions, invited talks and posters, were published in the Conference Handbook. The Symposium on Nuclear Physics has a long and distinguished history. From the beginning it was intended to be a relatively small meeting designed to bring together some of the leading nuclear scientists in the field. Its most distinctive feature is to provide a forum for specialists in different areas of nuclear physics, both theorists and experimentalists, students, postdocs and senior scientists, in a relaxed and informal environment providing them with a unique opportunity to exchange ideas. After the first meeting in Oaxtepec in 1978, the Symposium was organized every year without interruption which makes the present one the 39th in a row. The scientific program consisted of 29 invited talks and a poster session on a wide variety of hot topics in contemporary nuclear physics, ranging from the traditional fields of nuclear structure and nuclear reactions to radioactive beams, nuclear astrophysics, hadronic physics, fundamental symmetries and relativistic heavy ions, as well as progress reports of large international projects like the HAWC Observatory in Puebla, Mexico, and the ATLAS and ALICE Collaborations of the LHC accelerator at CERN, Switzerland. In addition, there were several contributions highlighting interesting new results from foreign laboratories like Notre Dame, RIKEN, Jefferson Lab, Oak Ridge, INFN-Legnaro and INFN-LNS, as well as Mexican laboratories at ININ, LEMA and the Carlos Graef Laboratory at IF-UNAM. On the theoretical side there were talks on recent developments in nuclear structure, weakly bound nuclei, cluster models, baryon spectroscopy and non-perturbative QCD. The high quality of the talks, the prestige of the speakers and the broad spectrum of subjects covered in the meeting, shows that nuclear physics is a very active area at the frontier of scientific research which establishes bridges between many different disciplines. (paper)