Open-charm production measurements with ALICE at the LHC

The LHC heavy-ion physics program aims at investigating the properties of strongly-interacting matter under extreme conditions of temperature and energy density where the formation of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) is expected. Heavy-flavour hadrons, containing charm and beauty quarks, are considered efficient probes to investigate the properties of the QGP produced in heavy-ion collisions. Heavy quarks are produced in hard partonic scattering processes in the initial stage of hadronic collisions and propagate through the hot and dense medium created in the collision losing energy interacting with the medium via radiative and collisional processes. The high precision tracking, good vertexing capabilities and excellent particle identification offered by the ALICE experiment allow us to measure particles containing heavy quarks in a wide transversemomentum range in pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions. A review of the main results on prompt D-mesons production, reconstructed via their hadronic decays at mid-rapidity, in pp collisions at sqrts = 7 TeV, p-Pb collisions at sqrts_NN = 5.02 TeV and Pb-Pb collisions at sqrts_NN = 2.76 TeV will be shown.