ELECTROWEAK CORRECTIONS TO THE FERMIONIC DECAY WIDTH OF THE STANDARD HIGGS BOSON

The partial decay width of the standard model Higgs particle into a general species of fermions H --> ffBAR is given at the electroweak 1-loop level. The analytic formulae are applicable to light and heavy fermions. Numerical results are presented for Higgs decays into b and t quarks and into charged leptons. For not too heavy Higgs bosons the radiative corrections are of the order of a few Per cent. In particular for Higgs bosons below the W+ W- threshold the correction to the partial width into b quarks is very small and insensitive to the top mass. For every heavy Higgs bosons the 1-loop corrections increase the fermionic decay widths for all channels up to 15%.