O(αsGFmt ) Corrections to the Fermionic Decay Rates of the Standard-Model Higgs Boson

Lowand intermediate mass Higgs bosons decay preferably into fermion pairs. The one-loop electroweak corrections to the respective decay rates are dominated by a flavour-independent term of O(GFmt ). We calculate the two-loop gluon correction to this term. It turns out that this correction screens the leading high-mt behaviour of the one-loop result by roughly 10%. We also present the two-loop QCD correction to the contribution induced by a pair of fourth-generation quarks with arbitrary masses. As expected, the inclusion of the QCD correction considerably reduces the renormalization-scheme dependence of the prediction.