  We show that production of the Higgs boson through gluon-fusion may be
suppressed in the presence of colored scalars. Substantial destructive
interference between the top quark diagrams and colored scalar diagrams is
possible due to cancellations between the real (and also imaginary) parts of
the amplitudes. As an example, we consider a color-octet scalar that has a
negative, order one coupling to the Higgs doublet. We find that gluon fusion
can be suppressed by more than an order of magnitude when the scalar mass is
below a few hundred GeV, while milder suppressions occur for larger scalar
masses or smaller couplings. Thus, the standard model extended with only one
particle can evade the full range of present LHC exclusion limits on the Higgs
mass. The colored scalars, however, would be produced in pairs with a large
rate at the LHC, leading to multi-jet final states to which the LHC experiments
are now becoming sensitive.
