Open-charm production as a function of charged particle multiplicity in pp collisions at \sqrt{s}=7 TeV with ALICE

Abstract

Heavy quarks (charm and beauty) are an effective tool to investigate the properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma created in heavy-ion collisions as they are produced in initial hard scattering processes and as they experience all the stages of the medium evolution. The measurement of heavy-flavour production cross sections in pp collisions at the LHC, besides providing a reference for heavy-ion studies, allows one to test perturbative QCD calculations. A brief review of ALICE results on the production of heavy-flavoured hadrons measured from fully reconstructed hadronic decay topologies in pp collisions at \sqrt{s} = 7 TeV is presented. Furthermore, heavy-flavour production was also studied as a function of the particle multiplicity in pp collisions. This could provide insight into multi-parton scatterings. A measurement of the inclusive J/ψ yield as a function of the charged-particle pseudorapidity density was performed by the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC in pp collisions at \sqrt{s} = 7 TeV. An increase of the J/ψ yield with increasing multiplicity was observed. In this context, the study of the yield of D mesons as a function of the charged-particle multiplicity could provide a deeper insight into charm-quark production in pp collisions. We will present the first results obtained for prompt D0, D+, and D*+ mesons using hadronic decay channels at midrapidity in pp collisions \sqrt{s}=7 TeV as a function of the charged-particle multiplicity. The prompt D-meson yields as a function of multiplicity are measured in different pT intervals. These yields will be compared to the results obtained for inclusive and non-prompt J/ψ.