Complete two-loop dominant corrections to the mass of the lightest -even Higgs boson in the minimal supersymmetric standard model

Abstract

Using an effective potential approach, we compute two-loop radiative corrections to the MSSM lightest ${\cal CP}$-even Higgs boson mass $M_{h^0}$ to ${\cal O}(\alpha_t^2)$ for arbitrary left-right top-squark mixing and $\tan\beta$. We find that these corrections can increase $M_{h^0}$ by as much as 5 GeV; assuming a SUSY scale of 1 TeV, the upper bound on the Higgs boson mass is $M_{h^0}\approx 129\pm 5$ GeV for the top quark pole mass $175\pm 5$ GeV. We also derive an analytical approximation formula for $M_{h^0}$ which is good to a precision of $\lsim 0.5$ GeV for most of the parameter space and suitable to be further improved by including renormalization group resummation of leading and next-to-leading order logarithmic terms. Our final compact formula admits a clear physical interpretation: radiative corrections up to the two-loop level can be well approximated by a one-loop expression with parameters evaluated at the appropriate scales, plus a smaller finite two-loop threshold correction term.