A degeneration of moduli of Hitchin pairs

We construct a degeneration of the moduli space of Hitchin pairs on smooth projective curves when the curve degenerates to an irreducible curve with a single node. The degeneration constructed here is analogous to the models constructed by Gieseker and Nagaraj-Seshadri for the case of the usual moduli spaces (i.e when the Higgs structure is trivial). There is an canonical relative Hitchin map which is shown to be proper and the general fibre of the relative Hitchin map provides a new compactification of the Picard variety of smooth curves with normal crossing singularities.