Inflation in $f(R,T)$ Gravity

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The article presents modeling of inflationary scenarios for the first time in the $f(R,T)$ theory of gravity.

• We assume the $f(R,T)$ functional from to be $R + \eta T$, where $R$ denotes the Ricci scalar, $T$ the trace of the energy-momentum tensor and $\eta$ the model parameter (constant).
• We first investigated an inflationary scenario where the inflation is driven purely due to geometric effects outside of GR.
• We found the inflation observables to be independent of the number of e-foldings in this setup.