Nuclear components in the bulges of disk galaxies

By combining surface brightness profiles from images taken in the HST/NICMOS F160W and ground-based (GB) K bands, we have obtained NIR profiles for a well studied sample of inclined disk galaxies, spanning radial ranges from 20 pc to a few kpc. We fit PSF-convolved Sersic-plus-exponential laws to the profiles, and compare the results with the fits to the ground-based data alone. HST profiles show light excesses over the best-fit Sersic law in the inner �1 arcsec. This is often as a result of inner power-law cusps similar to the inner profiles of intermediate- luminosity elliptical galaxies.