Robustness of Starobinsky inflation in a minimal two-field scalar-tensor completion

Abstract

We investigate whether the Starobinsky inflation remains robust after including a minimal scalar extension motivated by the one-loop effective action of scalar-tensor gravity. We numerically solve the four-dimensional background system derived from the reduced slow-roll action and discover that the exact Starobinsky branch is a finite-time attractor in the sampled slow-roll domain when the additional scalar is at least as heavy as the scalaron. We derive quadratic actions for tensor and scalar modes and find a healthy kinetic sector with no scalar or tensor gradient instabilities. The propagation speeds are indistinguishable from the speed of light over the tested range of the derivative-coupling coefficient. These stability tests use the complete constraint-reduced quadratic operator over $|β|\leq1$, whereas the quoted production curvature spectra are obtained from the reduced scalar evolution. A direct complete-spectrum comparison in $β$, a separate complete--reduced regression at $β=0$, and independent bounds on the canonically normalised coefficient differences constrain the omitted derivative-coupling correction, including the numerical and CPU--GPU allowances, to at most $\csname VALIDATION_COMPLETE_BOUND\endcsname$, below the $10^{-3}$ accuracy relevant to the physical conclusion. The curvature spectra remain extraordinarily close to the Starobinsky model across the entire parameter scan. Although the entropy-seeded mode can provide approximately one quarter of the final curvature power, removing the adiabatic--entropy mixing changes the total spectrum by only a few parts in a million, revealing nontrivial multifield dynamics behind an exceptionally robust observable prediction.