Heavy flavour physics in ALICE

Abstract

With a centre-of-mass energy of 5.5 TeV per nucleon, Pb–Pb collisions at the LHC are expected to provide a copious yield of heavy quarks. In this paper, an overview of the ALICE perspectives for heavy flavour physics will be presented. The ALICE experiment will detect quarkonia both in the e+e− and in the μ+μ− decay channels. Open heavy flavoured hadrons will be studied in the semileptonic decay channels at both central and forward rapidities. In addition, exclusive reconstruction of selected hadronic decay modes of charmed hadrons will be possible in the central rapidity region (|η| < 0.9).