Beauty production with the ALICE detector

Heavy flavour pairs produced in hadronic reactions provide a valuable laboratory for the study of strong interactions. Due to their relatively large mass, the production of heavy quarks should be reliably calculable in the perturbative approach. Charm and beauty quarks once produced in a heavy ion collision have to propagate through the surrounding quark-gluon matter. Heavy quark states are then a sensitive probe of the properties of the dense medium. ALICE is a general-purpose experiment equipped to reconstruct, among other signals, leptons from open charm and beauty via their leptonic decays in p-p, p-A and A-A collisions. In these proceedings, we present feasibility studies for ALICE measurements of beauty production in central Pb-Pb collisions at s_{NN}^1/2=5.5TeV using semileptonic decays.