Preface

XLIV Symposium on Nuclear Physics Hacienda Cocoyoc, Morelos, Mexico January 9-12, 2023 The 44th Symposium on Nuclear Physics was celebrated from January 9th to 12th, 2023 at the Hacienda Cocoyoc, Morelos, Mexico. This Symposium has been held every year since its inauguration in 1978 until 2020 despite earth quakes, last minute cancelations by the venue and economic crises. The COVID-19 crisis presented too much of a challenge and the Symposium had to be postponed for two years in a row. In this 2023, the Symposium is back! We had a tremendous response from the international community of nuclear physics which led to a very successful and lively meeting. The program consisted of 32 plenary talks and 20 posters over a broad range of hot topics, such as nuclear structure and reactions, instrumentation, relativistic heavy ions, nuclear astrophysics, fundamental symmetries and hadron physics. This proceedings contain 20 articles of exciting new results and developments in progress of amazing instrumentation that were presented at the meeting. At the meeting there were representatives of several international collaborations to report on the most recent research progress and the most recent developments in laboratories like FRIBS, ORNL, INFN-LNS, INFN-LNL, INFN-LUNA, ININ and the Texas A&amp;M, Notre Dame University and IF-UNAM facilities. During the presentations, recent data from NUMEN, AGATA, SUGAR@LNL, NNBAR, nEDM@SNS and the NOPTREX collaborations were shown. Many apparatus were as well presented, either as recent developments or showing their recent results; such as the K600 spectrometer, LHASA, SUGAR, AGATA, MUGAST, VAMOS, TriSol, FRAISE, FARCOS, CHIMERA and PROSPECT-I. Regarding the theoretical studies, interesting new developments involving different topics were presented on this edition, such as Shell Model, QCD, QED, Abinitio, baryons and pentaquarks, Nuclear Equation of State, Artificial Intelligence Approaches, nuclear clusters, R-matrix, nuclear dynamics and neutrino physics. The high quality of the talks and posters, the expertise of the speakers and the broad spectrum of subjects covered in the meeting, shows that nuclear physics continued working hard despite the Pandemic restrictions, being a very active area at the frontier of scientific research which establishes bridges between many different disciplines, putting together theoretical and experimental researchers and having an extension to the instrumentation developments and applications. Unfortunately, during the last three years we had to say goodbye to four distinguished colleagues who made pioneering contributions to nuclear physics in Mexico and were very instrumental in the success of this series of symposia. María Esther Ortiz (1936-2021) was the last surviving member of the organizing committee of the first symposium in 1978, Jorge Flores (1941-2020) and Pier Mello (1939-2022) were among the first graduate students in nuclear theory in Mexico, and Alfonso Mondragón (1941-2020) was a regular participant in the Symposium for some 35 years. All four were members of the Instituto de Física of the UNAM. The 44th Symposium is dedicated to their memory in celebration of their distinguished careers and in recognition of their important contributions to the development of nuclear physics in Mexico. Some local colleagues presented part of the history of these distinguish researchers at the beginning of the Symposium. In the following lines, some words coming from this homage: List of Editors, International Advisory Committee, Organizing Committee, Sponsors, Photograph of the event are available in this pdf.