Observations of quasar hosts with adaptive optics at Lick Observatory

We present near-infrared H-band observations of the hosts of three z similar to 1 quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey made with the adaptive optics system at Lick Observatory. We derive a point-spread function (PSF) for each quasar and model the host plus quasar nucleus to obtain magnitudes and approximate scale sizes for the host galaxies. We find our recovered host galaxies are similar to those found for z similar to 1 quasars observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. They also have, with one interesting exception, black hole mass estimates from their bulge luminosities that are consistent with those from emission-line widths. We thus demonstrate that adaptive optics can be successfully used for the quantitative study of quasar host galaxies, with the caveat that better PSF calibration will be needed for studies of the hosts of significantly brighter or higher redshift quasars with the Lick system.