Heavy flavor production in p+p collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 200$ GeV

Heavy flavor particles carrying charm or beauty quarks play an important role in understanding the physics of high energy hadronic collisions. Measurement of heavy flavor production in p+p collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 200$ GeV not only provides an important baseline for studying potential nuclear modifications of heavy flavor production in nucleus-nucleus collisions but also tests the applicability of perturbative QCD theory. The unique electron identification capabilities of the PHENIX detector at RHIC allow to measure semi-leptonic decays of heavy flavor particles. Using p+p data collected in the 2001 run, we have measured single electron inclusive $p_T$ distributions. The contribution from heavy flavor decays can be extracted by two independent methods. The ``Converter'' method uses a special data set where the photonic component of the inclusive electron spectrum is enhanced by adding a photon converter to the standard experimental setup. In the ``Cocktail'' method the contributions from Dalitz decays, other light hadron decays, and photon conversions are calculated and subtracted from the inclusive electron spectrum. The final results will be presented.