The light Higgs in supersymmetric models with Higgs triplets

In supersymmetric models the presence of Higgs triplets introduce new quartic interactions for the doublets that may raise the mass of the lightest CP-even field up to 205 GeV. We show that the complete effect of the triplets can be understood by decoupling them from the minimal sector and then analyzing the vacuum and the spectrum of the effective two-Higgs doubler model that results. We find that the maximum value of m(h) is only achieved in a very definite region of the parameter space. In this region, however, radiative corrections decrease the bound to approximate to 190 GeV. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.