Title: Initial conditions for inflation

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Abstract:
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Inflation solves a number of problems in early universe cosmology but potentially introduces some new ones regarding how it was able to get started in the first place. In this talk I will explain these issues in the context of single field slow roll inflationary models, and discuss how they might restrict the phase space of initial conditions and early universe models that we consider valid. I will describe work I have done using numerical relativity to investigate the problem in the non-linear regime, focussing on recent work considering the model dependence of the question (https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.12547).