Investigating charm quark production in heavy ion collisions using ALICE at the LHC

Heavy quark energy loss is used to study the properties of a quark gluon plasma. We are investigating charm quark production in p-Pb events at LHC energies with the ALICE detector. We study the impact of heavy flavor quark energy loss via the heavy flavor hadron production with respect to a jet. The jet is identified through a high momentum hadron. An angular correlation is performed using an associated electron from heavy flavor decays. The time projection chamber (TPC) is used to identify electron candidates via differential energy loss (dE/dx), which focuses on low momentum charm production. Various background sources are investigated to define the purity of the electron sample. Different event multiplicities are used to study the onset of a possible medium in p-Pb collisions. First analysis results of 5.02 GeV p-Pb collisions will be presented.