Top-quark mediated effects in hadronic Higgs-Strahlung

Novel contributions to the total inclusive cross section for Higgs-Strahlung in the Standard Model at hadron colliders are evaluated. Although formally of order αs2, they have not been taken into account in previous NNLO predictions. The terms under consideration are induced by Higgs radiation off top-quark loops and thus proportional to the top-quark Yukawa coupling. At the Tevatron, their effects to WH production are below 1% in the relevant Higgs mass range, while for ZH production, we find corrections between about 1% and 2%. At the LHC, the contribution of the newly evaluated terms to the cross section is typically of the order of 1%-3%. Based on these results, we provide updated predictions for the total inclusive Higgs-Strahlung cross section at the Tevatron and the LHC. (orig.)