Indirect Determination of the Higgs Mass Through Electroweak Radiative Corrections

Abstract

Electroweak precision observables allow stringent tests of the Standard Model at the quantum level and imply interesting bounds on the mass of the Higgs boson through higher-order loop effects. Very significant constraints come especially from the determination of the mass of the W boson and from the effective leptonic weak mixing angle. After shortly reviewing the status of theoretical computations of the W mass, the new calculation of two-loop corrections with closed fermion loops to the effective leptonic weak mixing angle is discussed in detail. The phenomenological implications of the new result are analyzed including an estimate of remaining uncertainties.