Construction of the Moduli Space of Higgs Bundles using Analytic Methods

It is a folklore theorem that the Kuranishi slice method can be used to construct the moduli space of semistable Higgs bundles on a closed Riemann surface as a complex space. The purpose of this paper is to provide a proof in detail. We also give a direct proof that the moduli space is locally modeled on an affine GIT quotient of a quadratic cone by a complex reductive group.