Heavy Flavour Physics with the ALICE detector at the CERN-LHC

Heavy quarks have been proposed as powerful probes to study hot quark matter produced in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. The measurement of the charm and beauty production cross sections in pp collisions provides a reference for the studies in heavy ion collisions. Moreover, the pp measurements at LHC will allow to test the perturbative QCD calculations in a totally new energy domain. In this contribution we present the first results from the analysis of charm and beauty production in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeV with the ALICE experiment, using the hadronic D meson and semi-leptonic D and B meson decays. In this talk I will present the first cross section measurement of muons from heavy flavour decays at forward rapidity and the heavy flavour electron spectra at central rapidity. We report on the first D meson cross section at central rapidity and the J/ψ production cross section at central and forward rapidity.