Higgs boson production via gluon fusion: Squark loops at NLO QCD

The loop-induced processes gg -> h, H, A provide the dominant Higgs boson production mechanisms at the Tevatron and LHC in a large range of the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model. For squark masses below similar to 400 GeV squark loop contributions become important in addition to the top and bottom quark loops. The next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the squark contributions of these processes are determined including the full squark and Higgs mass dependences. They turn out to be large and thus important for the Tevatron and LHC experiments. Squark mass effects of the K factors can be of O(20%). In addition we derive the QCD corrections to the squark contributions of the rare photonic Higgs decays h, H -> gamma gamma, which play a role for the Higgs searches at the LHC. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.