An introduction to 2d conformal field theory

Abstract

These lecture notes provide a comprehensive introduction to 2d conformal field theory, covering foundational topics such as free fields, minimal models, Zamolodchikov's $c$-theorem, Wess-Zumino-Witten models, modular invariant partition functions, and the connections to entanglement entropy. The material presented is based on lectures at the Southeast University Summer School and the course at Fudan University.

138 pages, no originality claimed, comments are welcome. v2; corrections in section 4.2,9.3,9.5,9.7 with apology for text overlaps by the first author in v1; v3 added explanation on conformal blocks, improved presentations and corrected typos; v4,v5 typos corrected