Near-Infrared Imaging of Barred Halo Dominated Low Surface Brightness
  Galaxies
  We present a near-infrared (NIR) imaging study of barred low surface
brightness (LSB) galaxies using the TIFR near-infrared Spectrometer and Imager
(TIRSPEC). LSB galaxies are dark matter dominated, late type spirals that have
low luminosity stellar disks but large neutral hydrogen (HI) gas disks. Using
SDSS images of a very large sample of LSB galaxies derived from the literature,
we found that the barred fraction is only 8.3%. We imaged twenty five barred
LSB galaxies in the J, H, K$_S$ wavebands and twenty nine in the K$_S$ band.
Most of the bars are much brighter than their stellar disks, which appear to be
very diffuse. Our image analysis gives deprojected mean bar sizes of
$R_{b}/R_{25}$ = 0.40 and ellipticities $e$ $\approx$ 0.45, which are similar
to bars in high surface brightness galaxies. Thus, although bars are rare in
LSB galaxies, they appear to be just as strong as bars found in normal
galaxies. There is no correlation of $R_{b}/R_{25}$ or $e$ with the relative HI
or stellar masses of the galaxies. In the (J-K$_S$) color images most of the
bars have no significant color gradient which indicates that their stellar
population is uniformly distributed and confirms that they have low dust
content.
