Heavy quarks are useful probes to investigate the properties of the
Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) produced in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC, since
they are produced in initial hard scattering processes. To single out the
signals that are characteristic of the QGP, it is nevertheless crucial to
understand the primordial heavy-quark production in vacuum, and to disentangle
hot from cold nuclear matter effects. Moreover, observations of collective
effects in high-multiplicity pp and p-Pb collisions show surprising
similarities with those in heavy-ion collisions. Heavy-flavour production in
such collisions could give further insight into the underlying processes. The
heavy-flavour production can be studied with e+eβ pairs from
correlated semileptonic decays of heavy-flavour hadrons. Compared to single
heavy-flavour measurements, the dielectron yield contains information about the
initial kinematical correlations between the charm and anti-charm quarks, which
is otherwise not accessible, and is sensitive to soft heavy-flavour production.
We report results on correlated e+eβ pairs in pp collisions
recorded by the ALICE detector at different collision energies. The production
of heavy quarks is discussed by comparing the yield of dielectrons from
heavy-flavour hadron decays as a function of invariant mass, pair transverse
momentum and distance of closest approach to the primary vertex with different
Monte Carlo event generators. The heavy-flavour production cross sections are
also presented. Results from high-multiplicity pp collisions at sβ=13
TeV and the status of the p-Pb analysis at sNNββ=5.02 TeV are
reported as well.Comment: Contribution to EPS-HEP 2019, submitted Proceedings of Scienc