ALICE is the dedicated heavy-ion experiment at the LHC. Its main physics goal
is to study the properties of the strongly-interacting matter in the conditions
of high energy density (>10 GeV/fm3) and high temperature (> 0.3 GeV) expected
to be reached in central Pb\^aPb collisions. Charm and beauty quarks are a
powerful tool to investigate this high density and strongly interacting state
of matter as they are produced in initial hard scatterings, and due to their
long life time, they probe all the stages of the system evolution. The detector
design was optimized for heavy ions but is also well suited for pp studies.
ALICE recorded pp data at s= 7 TeV since march 2010 and the first run with
heavy ion collisions took place in November 2010. The measurement of charm
production cross section in pp collisions provides interesting insight into QCD
processes and is important as a reference for heavy ion studies. The
measurement of the D- meson yield in pp collisions can be used to extract the
charm cross section. In this contribution, the ongoing study of reconstruction
of D-mesons through hadronic decay channels and the first preliminary results
obtained with \sqrt{s}= 7 TeV pp data will be presented.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Conference proceeding to be published in Nucl.
Phys.