Initial Conditions for Inflation - A Short Review

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current understanding of initial conditions necessary for cosmological inflation, highlighting differences between large field and small field models regarding their attractor behavior.

Contribution

It clarifies the conditions under which inflationary trajectories are attractors, emphasizing the distinction between large and small field inflation models.

Findings

Large field models have inflationary attractor trajectories.

Small field models lack such attractor behavior.

The review consolidates evidence on initial condition requirements for inflation.

Abstract

I give a brief review of the status of research on the nature of initial conditions required to obtain a period of cosmological inflation. It is shown that there is good evidence that in the case of large field models, the inflationary slow-roll trajectory is a local attractor in initial condition space, whereas it is not in the case of small field models.