Dr Andrea Dubla (GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research)
In this contribution, we present the latest measurements of $\Lambda^{+}_{\rm c}$, $\Xi^{+,0}_{\rm c}$, $\Sigma^{0,++}_{\rm c}$, and the first measurement of $\Omega^{0}_{\rm c}$ baryons performed with the ALICE detector at midrapidity in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 5.02 and 13 TeV. Recent measurements of charm-baryon production at midrapidity by the ALICE Collaboration in small systems show a baryon-over-meson ratio significantly higher than that in e+e− collisions, suggesting that the fragmentation of charm is not universal across different collision systems. Thus, measurements of charm-baryon production are crucial to study the charm quark hadronisation in proton--proton collisions and its difference with respect to e+e− collisions, which is relevant also for the description the heavy-flavour mesons. In fact, the production cross sections of open heavy-flavour mesons are typically described within the factorisation approach as the convolution of the parton distribution functions of the incoming protons, the perturbative QCD partonic cross section, and the fragmentation functions which are typically parametrised from measurements in e+e− collisions. In addition, the large measured baryon yields it is an important contribution for accurate measurement of the $\rm c\overline{c}$ production cross section at midrapidity in pp collisions at the LHC, which status and progress are also presented.