HIGGS PHENOMENOLOGY AT ONE-LOOP IN THE STANDARD MODEL

We present a synopsis of Higgs-boson phenomenology at one loop in the standard model. Two-loop effects are reported on as far as present knowledge goes. The phenomena are classified according to the number of external particles participating in the interaction. The relevant classes correspond to two-, three-, four-, and five-point functions. Two-point functions are the source of indirect evidence for the Higgs boson; three-point functions control its two-body decays and its production through fusion processes at hadron and photon colliders; four-point functions trigger its three-body decays and its associated production with another particle that balances the quantum numbers or serves as a signal; five-point functions mediate Higgs-boson four-body decays and production from intermediate-boson fusion at hadron, ep, and e+e- colliders. Of course, the study of quantum corrections to these processes is interesting in its own right, since it provides a deeper insight into the completely untested Higgs sector of the electroweak theory. However, in some cases the effects are very significant and their neglect leads to rather inadequate predictions, e.g., in the case of the H --> bbBAR decay or the gluon-fusion mechanism. The purpose of this article is to deliver a broad review of the quantum effects related to the Higgs boson, to highlight their phenomenological relevance, to list the most important formulae for quick reference, and to generate a rich bibliography, so that the interested reader can find the source of the results. We shall illustrate the effects in numerous figures and investigate various limiting cases, e.g., light or heavy virtual fermions, a heavy Higgs boson, etc. For the reader's convenience, we shall collect the relevant two-, three-, and four-point loop integrals as well as the boson vacuum polarizations and fermion self-energies in a number of appendices.