Supersymmetric Higgs production at the Large Hadron Collider

We review the status of theoretical predictions for the production of neutral Higgs bosons at the LHC. Special emphasis is put on the role of bottom quarks in the gluon fusion process and in the associated production of Higgs bosons with bb-bar pairs.Comment: LaTeX, 3 pages, 9 PostScript files included. Talk given at the HEP2003 Europhysics Conference in Aachen, Germany (EPS 2003), July 17-23, 200

Higgs production in heavy quark annihilation through next-to-next-to-leading order QCD

The total inclusive cross section for charged and neutral Higgs production in heavy-quark annihilation is presented through NNLO QCD. It is shown that, aside from an overall factor, the partonic cross section is independent of the initial-state quark flavors, and that any interference terms involving two different Yukawa couplings vanish. A simple criterion for defining the central renormalization and factorization scale is proposed. Its application to the $b\bar bH$ process yields results which are compatible with the values usually adopted for this process. Remarkably, we find little variation in these values for the other initial-state quark flavors. Finally, we disentangle the impact of the different parton luminosities from genuine hard NNLO effects and find that, for the central scales, a naive rescaling by the parton luminosities approximates the full result remarkably well.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Matches published versio

Techniques for NNLO Higgs production in the Standard Model and the MSSM

New techniques developed in connection with the NNLO corrections to the Higgs production rate at hadron colliders and some recent applications are reviewed.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, 4 ps-files included. Talk presented at the XXXVIIIth Rencontres de Moriond, QCD and High Energy Hadronic Interactions, Les Arcs, France, March 22-29, 200

Hadronic Higgs Production and Decay in Supersymmetry at Next-to-Leading Order

Supersymmetric QCD corrections to the gluonic production and decay rate of a CP-even Higgs boson are evaluated at next-to-leading order. To this aim, we derive an effective Lagrangian for the gluon-Higgs coupling. We show that a consistent calculation requires the inclusion of gluino effects, in contrast to what has been done previously. The supersymmetric corrections to the gluon-Higgs coupling lead to a modification of the next-to-leading order K-factor for the Higgs production rate at the LHC by less than five percent.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX, 12 ps-files included. v2: Typos fixed, references added, minor modifications. v3: Typos fixed