Speaker
Description
Measurements of heavy-flavour production are a powerful tool to study the properties of the strongly-interacting partonic medium created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The measurements in pp collisions serve as a precision test of perturbative QCD apart from providing the crucial reference for Pb-Pb collisions. Measurements in p-Pb collisions are used to investigate cold nuclear matter effects such as the modification of the parton densities in nuclei with respect to nucleons, kT broadening and energy loss in cold nuclear matter, or a potential existence of collective phenomena. ALICE is well suited to measure heavy-flavour (charm and beauty) production, not only via the full reconstruction of hadronic decays of D-mesons and charm baryons at mid rapidity but also via the measurement of electrons (muons) from semileptonic heavy-flavour hadron decays at mid (forward/backward) rapidity. The aforementioned measurements are performed over a wide transverse-momentum range thanks to the high precision tracking, good vertexing capabilities and excellent particle identification provided by the ALICE detectors. In this contribution, recent results on open heavy-flavour production in pp and p-Pb collision systems will be presented for a wide range of pT and pseudorapidity and for different center-of-mass energies.
