Open heavy-flavour production in pp and p--Pb collisions with the ALICE experiment

Abstract

Measurements of the heavy-flavour hadron production are a powerful tool to study the nature of strong interaction and to understand the properties of nuclear matter that is created in ultra-relativistic hadron-hadron collisions. The excellent tracking and vertexing capabilities of the ALICE experiment, together with its particle identification systems, allow for an efficient identification and reconstruction of decays of hadrons that contain heavy quarks. A selection of recent measurements on open heavy-flavour production from pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV and p--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV, collected with the ALICE detector during the LHC Run-1 phase, are discussed in this paper.