ALICE potential for heavy-flavour physics

Abstract

Heavy quarks will be abundantly produced in Heavy Ion Collisions at LHC energies. Both the production of open heavy flavoured mesons and quarkonia will probe the strongly interacting medium created in these reactions. In particular, the ALICE detector will be able to measure heavy flavour production down to low transverse momentum, combining leptonic and hadronic channels, covering a large rapidity range |η| < 0.9 and −4 < η < −2.5. In this talk we will present the main physics motivations for the study of heavy flavour production at LHC energies and some examples of physics analyses developed by the heavy flavour working group of ALICE.