  A particular extension of Einstein's General Relativity up to and including
quartic terms in the curvature tensor is minimal in the sense that it has a
unique maximally symmetric vacuum and only a massless spin-2 excitation in its
spectrum around the vacuum. We study the inflation phase of the universe in the
minimal quartic extension of Einstein's gravity in the presence of trace
anomaly terms in the Standard Model and the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard
Model and show that the theory allows a quasi-de Sitter phase with a sufficient
number of $e$-foldings and is compatible with the spectral index and the tensor
to scalar ratio.
