QCD CORRECTIONS TO HIGGS-BOSON PRODUCTION AT PROTON-PROTON COLLIDERS

Gluon fusion is the main production mechanism for Higgs bosons with masses up to several hundred GeV in pp collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider and Superconducting Super Collider. We present the QCD corrections to the fusion cross section for arbitrary Higgs boson and top quark mass values: gg --> H(g), gq --> Hq, and qqBAR --> Hg. The QCD corrections are positive and they increase the cross section sigma(pp --> H) by about a factor of 1.5 to 1.7. The analysis applies to the production of Higgs particles in the standard model and also to the production of the CP-even Higgs particles in extensions of the Higgs sector as required, for example, by supersymmetric theories.