Open-charm production measurements in pp, 1 p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions with ALICE at the LHC

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is designed to study the strongly in teracting matter, the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), created in heavy-ion collisions at LHC energies. Charm and beauty quarks are powerful probes to study the QGP. Produced in hard partonic scattering processes on a short time scale, they are expected to traverse the QCD medium, interacting with its constituents and losing energy through radiative and collisional processes. In ALICE, open-charm production is studied through the reconstruction of the hadronic decays of D0, D+, D*+ and Ds+ mesons at mid-rapidity. High precision tracking, good vertexing capabilities and excellent particle identification offered by ALICE allow for the measurement of particles containing heavy quarks (particularly D mesons) in a wide transverse momentum range in pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions. A review of the main results on D-meson production in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeV, p-Pb collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV and Pb-Pb collisions at √sNN = 2.76 TeV will be presented.