The study of young substellar objects with ALMA

We discuss the potential of ALMA for studying the formation of substellar objects. We first review briefly the various formation mechanisms proposed so far and stress the unique capability of ALMA to detect and study pre-brown dwarf cores and to confirm the core-collapse scenario to the lowest possible masses. We then discuss the properties of disks around substellar objects. We show how it will be possible to detect with ALMA most disks around objects with mass as low as few Jupiter masses, and to resolve spatially their emission in the more favorable cases.