Recent heavy-flavour measurements with ALICE

Abstract

In this contribution, an overview on the latest results of the ALICE Collaboration on the production of heavy-flavour hadrons in pp and Pb–Pb collision systems will be presented. Due to their large masses, heavy quarks are produced on shorter time scales than the typical QGP formation time, thus they participate to the system evolution and interact with the medium constituents making the heavy-flavour quarks a perfect probe to investigate the QGP properties. Heavy-flavour production measurements in pp collisions are a needed reference for Pb–Pb studies, to study the hadronization mechanisms in small colliding systems and to test perturbative QCD calculations at the LHC energies. The results presented report charm and beauty cross section measurements with an unprecedented precision down to very low momentum. In addition, results on heavy-flavour production highlight the non-universality of heavy-quark fragmentation fractions among different collision systems and energy scales.