The 58th DAE Symposium on Nuclear Physics was held as an international event at Mumbai during 2–6 December 2013. This annual event has been instrumental in setting up a tradition for research in nuclear physics in particular, and basic sciences in general in our country. Over the years, the symposium has given birth to various other symposia and conferences in different subjects like solid-state physics, accelerator physics, etc. Research in nuclear physics gained enormously when the Pelletron accelerator was set up by Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). The year 2013 also marked the Silver Jubilee of this accelerator – a session was put together to celebrate this event. It was heartening to experience the enthusiasm of the plenary speakers who readily accepted our invitation and travelled long distances to share their important work. In all, the participants were from 11 countries and 17 states of India, a total equalling five hundred which was the largest participation ever. The symposium consisted of 32 invited plenary talks, 480 contributed papers, and 16 Ph.D. theses. The plenary speakers were chosen after detailed deliberations by the members of the Organizing and AdvisoryCommittees. The topics included nuclear structure and reactions, radioactive ion beams, hadron physics, relativistic nuclear collisions and quark gluon plasma, intersections of nuclear physics with particle and astrophysics, and nuclear instrumentation.

We thank the Board of Research in Nuclear Sciences, Department of Atomic Energy, for funding the symposium. We are grateful to Dr R K Sinha, Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission and Shri Sekhar Basu, Director, BARC for their support. The venues of the symposium were Nabhikiya Urja Bhawan Auditorium (December 2–5) and Homi Bhabha Auditorium, TIFR (December 6). We are grateful to Shri K C Purohit, CMD, Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd for providing their wonderful infrastructure. Prof. Mustansir Barma, Director, TIFR has always encouraged and supported us and we remain grateful to him.

We thank Prof. Rohini Godbole, Editor, Pramana – J. Phys. for accepting our proposal to publish the articles based on plenary talks. All the articles have been refereed by some of the leading experts in the field. The team at the Editorial Office has been very cooperative, we appreciate this very much. Finally, we thank the contributors and esteemed referees for their cooperation that helped us in bringing out this Special Issue.

                                                                                                                                                                               Sudhir R Jain, Renju G Thomas, Vivek M Datar

                                                                                                                                                                      Nuclear Physics Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre,

                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Mumbai 400 085, India

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         (Editors)