Open Charm Mesons at the LHC with ALICE

Abstract

The ALICE experiment will be able to detect hadrons containing charm and beauty quarks in proton-proton and heavy ion collisions in the new energy regime of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Open charmed mesons are a powerful tool to study the medium produced in heavy ion collisions, since charm quarks are produced on a very short time scale and they experience the whole history of the collision. In addition, the measurements of heavy flavour yield provide a natural normalization for those of charmonia and bottomonia production at LHC. In this talk, after a general overview of ALICE perspectives for heavy flavour physics, we will report some study of D-meson reconstruction through their hadronic decay channels with Monte Carlo simulated data.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure