Counter-rotating disks in galaxies: dissecting kinematics and stellar
  populations with 3D spectroscopy
  We present a spectral decomposition technique that separates the contribution
of different kinematic components in galaxies from the observed spectrum. This
allows to study the kinematics and properties of the stellar populations of the
individual components (e.g., bulge, disk, counter-rotating cores, orthogonal
structures). Here, we discuss the results of this technique for galaxies that
host counter-rotating stellar disks of comparable size. In all the studied
cases, the counter-rotating stellar disk is the less massive, the youngest and
has different chemical content (metallicity and alpha-elements abundance ratio)
than the main galaxy disk. Further applications of the spectral decomposition
technique are also discussed.
