Theoretical Introduction

After an introduction to the Higgs sector of supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, recent results on radiative corrections to Higgs boson masses and couplings are reviewed. The phenomenology of supersymmetric Higgs searches at large hadron colliders and at a possible linear ee collider is also described. Invited talk at the Workshop ‘Ten years of SUSY confronting experiment’, CERN, 7–9 September 1992, to appear in the Proceedings CERN-TH.6792/93 February 1993 On leave from INFN, Sezione di Padova, Padua, Italy. 1 The Higgs sector of SUSY models It has been known for a long time [1] that realistic supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model (SM) require at least two Higgs doublets. Higgs fields must be embedded in chiral supermultiplets, whose physical degrees of freedom are a complex spin-0 boson and a two-component spin-1/2 fermion, and their Yukawa couplings to the matter fermions are encoded in the superpotential, an analytic function of the chiral superfields. At least two Higgs doublets are then needed: 1) to give masses to all quarks and charged leptons via superpotential couplings; 2) to avoid higgsino-induced chiral anomalies (in the absence of other anomaly-cancellation mechanisms); 3) to avoid the existence of a massless charged spin-1/2 particle in the gaugino-higgsino sector. 1.1 The minimal model In the Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (MSSM), the Higgs sector consists of just two doublets: