Hadronic Higgs production and decay in supersymmetry at next-to-leading order

Supersymmetric QCD corrections to the gluonic production and decay rate of a CP-even Higgs boson are evaluated at next-to-leading order. To this aim, we derive an effective Lagrangian for the gluon-Higgs coupling. We show that a consistent calculation requires the inclusion of gluino effects, in contrast to what has been done previously. The supersymmetric corrections to the gluon-Higgs coupling lead to a modification of the next-to-leading order K-factor for the Higgs production rate at the LHC by less than 5%. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V.