Open Heavy Flavour Detection in ALICE

The start of the operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled for next year, will open a new chapter for heavy-ion physics. An important new aspect at the LHC, with respect to the existing accelerators, will be the abundant production of heavy quarks, that are expected to be a key probe of the strongly interacting medium produced in the collision. We present results on the expected experimental capability for the measurement of heavy flavour production in the central barrel of ALICE, the dedicated heavy-ion experiment at the LHC.