Define the stress-energy tensor by metric variation with the scalar held fixed:
Use compactly supported variations to remove boundary terms. The first covariant derivative of a scalar field is an ordinary derivative, so it has no connection variation. Varying the kinetic term and the volume form gives
For the curvature term set . Using part (a), its variation is
Applying integration by parts twice moves each pair of derivatives from the metric variation onto . The result is
where is the Einstein tensor and is the d'Alembert operator. Comparing with the defining variation gives the stress-energy tensor of a nonminimally coupled scalar field:
The factor follows from the action's coupling ; a convention using would instead give in that bracket. At this reduces to the massless Klein-Gordon scalar stress-energy tensor.