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Description
We present the Spectroscopic Imaging survey in the near-infrared (near-IR) with SINFONI (SINS) of high-redshift galaxies. With 80 objects observed and 63 detected in at least one rest-frame optical nebular emission line, mainly H{alpha}, SINS represents the largest survey of spatially resolved gas kinematics, morphologies, and physical properties of star-forming galaxies at z~1-3. We describe the selection of the targets, the observations, and the data reduction. We then focus on the "SINS H{alpha} sample," consisting of 62 rest-UV/optically selected sources at 1.3<z<2.6 for which we targeted primarily the H{alpha} and [NII] emission lines. Only ~30% of this sample had previous near-IR spectroscopic observations. The galaxies were drawn from various imaging surveys with different photometric criteria; as a whole, the SINS H{alpha} sample covers a reasonable representation of massive M_*_>~10^10^M_{sun}_ star-forming galaxies at z~1.5-2.5, with some bias toward bluer systems compared to pure K-selected samples due to the requirement of secure optical redshift. The H{alpha} morphologies tend to be irregular and/or clumpy. About one-third of the SINS H{alpha} sample galaxies are rotation-dominated yet turbulent disks, another one-third comprises compact and velocity dispersion-dominated objects, and the remaining galaxies are clear interacting/merging systems; the fraction of rotation-dominated systems increases among the more massive part of the sample.
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