These lecture notes are based on a graduate course given at the “Ludwig-
Maximilians-Universit¨at M¨unchen” during the winter term 2007/2008 as part of the
“Theoretical and Mathematical Physics” master programme‡. Although the main
target group of this course were master students, we decided to prepare these notes
for a more general audience including Ph.D. students and Postdocs.
These lecture notes are intended to give an introduction to conformal field theories
in two dimensions with special emphasis on computational issues important
for applications in string theory. We assume the reader to be familiar with Quantum
Mechanics on the level of a graduate course and to have some basic knowledge
of quantum field theory, even though the later is not a necessity. The notions of
conformal field theory will be introduced in due course, however, string theory is
not introduced in a self-contained manner. While familiarity with string theory is
not a prerequisite for understanding these notes, for students intending to appreciate
the presented techniques we highly recommend to study an introductory book on
string theory in parallel.