Optics Assisted 3 D spectroscopy observations for black hole mass measurements

The very high spatial resolution provided by Adaptive Optics assisted spectroscopic observations at 8m-class telescopes (e.g. with SINFONI at the VLT) will allow to greatly increase the number of direct black hole (BH) mass measurements which is currently very small. This is a fundamental step to investigate the tight link between galaxy evolution and BH growth, revealed by the existing scaling relations between M BH and galaxy structural parameters. I present preliminary results from SINFONI K-band spectroscopic observations of a sample of 5 objects with M BH measurements obtained with the Reverberation Mapping (RM) technique. This technique is the starting point to derive the so-called virial M BH estimates, currently the only way to measure M BH at high redshift. Our goal is to assess the reliability of RM by measuring M BH with both gas and stellar kinematical methods and to investigate whether active galaxies follow the same M BH-galaxy correlations as normal ones.