  The ALICE experiment, at the Large Hadron Collider located at CERN, is
designed to investigate the physics of strongly interacting matter at very high
energy densities. We present an analysis strategy of reconstructing open charm
mesons with ALICE via the hadronic decay of D0 and D* mesons. Heavy flavours,
produced at the The Large Hadron Collider, are excellent tools to investigate
the properties of the QCD medium produced in heavy-ion collisions. Baseline
measurements of heavy flavour production mechanisms in pp collisions are
necessary in order to understand the production in the medium as well as medium
induced effects. The study shows that for one year of data taking we will be
able to measure charmed mesons with very large significances (78 for D0 and 33
for D?). Both yields allow a measurement in one month of data taking (about 100
million events) with a D? significance of 10. The reconstruction of the charged
mesons is more difficult than for the neutral mesons due to kinematic
constraints on the soft pion in case of the D* decay. Most of these pions have
momenta lower than 0.4 GeV/c which makes them difficult to detect and therefore
the reconstruction efficiency is very low. However, by using the ALICE Inner
Tracking System as a standalone detector, the reconstruction efficiencies for
kaons and pions at very low momenta are improved. Due to selection criteria
imposed on the tracks the overall efficiency increase for the D* with the
ITS-standalone procedure is reported to be 7%. Note that after applying the
cuts on the D mesons, the contamination with D0 from beauty decays becomes
slightly larger (10%). For analyses where high efficiency is preferred over
high purity, the cuts on the D* and D0 can be loosened in order to have as many
particles as possible. In this case, a review of the contamination from B
decays is needed.
