Leading electroweak correction to Higgs boson production at proton colliders

Abstract

At proton colliders, Higgs particles are dominantly produced in the gluon--gluon fusion mechanism. The Higgs--gluons coupling is mediated by heavy quark loops, and the process can serve to count the number of heavy strongly interacting particles whose masses are generated by the Higgs mechanism. We present the two--loop leading electroweak radiative correction to this coupling, which is quadratically proportional to the heavy quark masses. It turns out thatthis correction is well under control across the physically interesting quark mass ranges.