Description
This work investigates inflation in a left-right symmetric extension of Higgs inflation, formulated in a first-order gravitational framework. Specializing to a single-field inflationary trajectory, the model admits two physically distinct cases: real , associated with complex-conjugate non-minimal couplings, and purely imaginary , associated with real non-minimal couplings.
We explore the parameter space of this inflationary model by comparing theoretical predictions with observational constraints on the scalar spectral index, scalar amplitude, and tensor-to-scalar ratio. Because direct numerical evaluation is expensive, the investigation uses an emulator-assisted pipeline combining Mathematica-generated inflationary observables, machine-learning classifiers and regressors, active candidate generation, and MCMC sampling. In both cases, the models reproduce Planck-compatible scalar predictions, while the tensor-to-scalar ratio remains broadly distributed below current bounds. Thus, current data do not strongly distinguish the real and imaginary coupling sectors.
Finally, we consider the physics of reheating as a way to further constrain the model.