Special geometry and perturbative analysis of N=2 heterotic vacua

The requirement of target-space duality and the use of nonrenormalization theorems lead to strong constraints on the perturbative prepotential that encodes the low-energy effective action of $N=2$ heterotic superstring vacua. The analysis is done in the context of special geometry, which governs the couplings of the vector multiplets. The presentation is kept at an introductory level.