Supersymmetric Higgs production in gluon fusion at next-to-leading order

Abstract

The next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to the production and decay rate of a Higgs boson are computed within the framework of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). The calculation is based on an effective theory for light and intermediate mass Higgs bosons. We provide a Fortran routine for the numerical evaluation of the coefficient function. For most of the MSSM parameter space, the relative size of the NLO corrections is typically of the order of 5% smaller than the Standard Model value. We exemplify the numerical results for two scenarios: the benchmark point SPS1a, and a parameter region where the gluon-Higgs coupling at leading order is very small due to a cancellation of the squark and quark contributions.