Introduction to stability conditions

These are notes of a course given at the 'school on moduli spaces' at the Newton Institute in January 2011. The abstract theory of stability conditions (due to Bridgeland and Douglas) on abelian and triangulated categories is developed via tilting and t-structures. Special emphasis is put on the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves on smooth projective varieties (in particular for curves and K3 surfaces). The lectures were targeted at an audience with little prior knowledge of triangulated categories and stability conditions but with an interest in vector bundles on curves.