Photonic and QCD radiative corrections to Higgs-boson production in mu+ mu- --> f fbar

Abstract

The photonic and QCD radiative corrections at next-to-leading order are calculated for fermion-pair production at muon colliders, maintaining the full mass dependence and helicity information of the muons and the produced fermions. Higher-order effects of initial-state radiation are included at the leading logarithmic level. In the calculation particular attention is paid to the issue of gauge invariance in the vicinity of resonances. The most important corrections are presented in analytical form. The detailed numerical discussion concentrates on the corrections to the (s-channel) Higgs-boson resonances in the Standard Model and its minimal supersymmetric extension. The results show that photonic initial- and QCD final-state corrections are very important in a precision study of Higgs resonances, but that (photonic) initial-final interferences are widely suppressed and only modify the non-resonant background.