Observations of Quasar Hosts with Adaptive Optics at Lick Observatory

We present near-infrared H-band observations of the hosts of three z~1quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey made with the adaptive optics systemat Lick Observatory. We derive a PSF for each quasar and model the host plusquasar nucleus to obtain magnitudes and approximate scale sizes for the hostgalaxies. We find our recovered host galaxies are similar to those found forz~1 quasars observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. They also have, with oneinteresting exception, black hole mass estimates from their bulge luminositieswhich are consistent with those from emission-line widths. We thus demonstratethat adaptive optics can be successfully used for the quantitative study ofquasar host galaxies, with the caveat that better PSF calibration will beneeded for studies of the hosts of significantly brighter or higher redshiftquasars with the Lick system.Comment: Accepted by AJ, 12 page