Testing an inflationary era in curvature–matter coupling gravity.

In this paper, we investigate the cosmological inflation in the context of a minimal matter–geometry coupling, which is based on the f (R , T) gravity theory, where f is a generic function of the curvature scalar R and the trace T of the energy–momentum tensor. Assuming that the slow-roll inflation conditions hold true in f (R , T) gravity, we obtain the various inflation-related observables such as the tensor-to-scalar ratio r , the scalar spectral index n s , the running α s of the spectral index and the tensor spectral n T for two specific f (R , T) models from the Hubble slow-roll parameters. To observe the viability of these models, a numerical analysis of such parameters has been done. The results showed that, by using the various values of free parameters, it is possible to obtain a viable compatible with the observational data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]