2026-03-29
How should a research group preserve negative results before they turn into unspoken folklore?
Repeated dead ends are often remembered socially, not structurally, which makes them hard to reuse.
research processknowledge management
Kang-Kang Shao
Visiting Researcher
Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST)
Advisors: Qin Qin, Fu-Sheng Yu
Research Interests
Heavy flavor physics
Inclusive charm decays
HQET and OPE
Heavy-flavor phenomenology
About
I am currently a visiting researcher at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
My research lies in high-energy physics. Particle physics aims to understand the most fundamental constituents of matter and the laws governing their interactions. Since its establishment in the 1960s and 1970s, the Standard Model of particle physics has achieved remarkable success in describing and predicting a wide range of experimental phenomena. Nevertheless, for certain processes and observables, there remain deviations or unresolved issues between Standard Model predictions and experimental measurements that call for further clarification. Carrying out high-precision studies around these questions is one of the major directions in contemporary high-energy physics. In this context, weak decays of heavy-flavor hadrons contain rich dynamical information and provide a key platform for precision tests of the Standard Model.
My specific research focuses on inclusive semileptonic decays of heavy-flavor hadrons, especially D mesons and charmed baryons. Using the local operator product expansion based on heavy quark effective theory as the main theoretical framework, I study high-precision calculations of physical observables such as decay widths, lepton energy spectra, and moments. Based on these calculations, I connect theory with experimental data to extract nonperturbative parameters and Standard Model parameters such as CKM matrix elements. I also compare these results with those extracted from other inclusive decay channels, both to provide cross-checks for precision tests of the Standard Model and to examine, from a data-driven perspective, the applicability of the relevant theoretical framework in the charm sector. Inclusive semileptonic widths of heavy hadrons are indeed standard observables for HQE/OPE analyses and parameter extraction.
Recently, I have been particularly interested in several issues in inclusive semileptonic decays of charmed baryons, including higher-order power corrections and perturbative corrections to the electron energy spectrum and the lepton pair invariant-mass spectrum, as well as shape-function effects in the endpoint region of the electron energy spectrum. At the same time, I continue to work on heavy-quark mass schemes and on consistency checks in phenomenological analyses.
Selected Publications
View All →Data determination of HQET parameters in inclusive charm decays
Kang-Kang Shao, Chun Huang, Qin Qin
Eur. Phys. J. C
Data-driven extraction of HQET parameters from inclusive charm decays using phenomenological analysis.
Inclusive weak-annihilation decays and lifetimes of beauty-charmed baryons
Guo-He Yang, En-Pei Liang, Qin Qin, Kang-Kang Shao
Phys. Rev. D
Study of inclusive weak-annihilation decays and lifetime structure in beauty-charmed baryons.
Open Questions
2026-03-12
When does a smaller, cleaner evaluation protocol beat a larger benchmark with noisier assumptions?
Some low-resource settings seem to reward tighter experimental framing more than broader task coverage.
evaluationbenchmarking
2026-02-21
Can field photographs function as problem-formulation tools rather than only as illustrations?
Visual artifacts sometimes capture structure and attention cues before the formal question is articulated.
visual thinkingresearch methods
2026-01-30
What makes an open problem legible enough for collaboration without prematurely forcing a solution path?
The line between useful framing and over-commitment is often where promising collaborations stall.
collaborationproblem formulation