Virtual Top Effects on Low-Mass Higgs Interactions at Next-to-Leading Order in QCD

Abstract

We present the next-to-leading-order QCD corrections of O(alpha_s^2 G_F M_t^2) to the low-M_H effective l^+l^-H, ZZH, and W^+W^-H interaction Lagrangians in the high-M_t limit. In the on-shell scheme formulated with G_F, the O(alpha_s^2 G_F M_t^2) corrections support the O(alpha_s G_F M_t^2) ones and further increase the screening of the O(G_F M_t^2) terms. The coefficients of (alpha_s/pi)^2 range from -6.847 to -16.201, being in line with the value -14.594 recently found for Delta rho. All four QCD expansions converge considerably more rapidly, if they are written with mu_t=m_t(mu_t), where m_t(mu) is the MS-bar mass, rather than the pole mass, M_t.