Stable pairs on curves and surfaces

We describe stability conditions for pairs consisting of a coherent sheaf and a homomorphism to a fixed coherent sheaf on a projective variety. The corresponding moduli spaces are constructed for pairs on curves and surfaces. We consider two examples. The fixed sheaf is the structure sheaf or is a vector bundle on a divisor, i.e. Higgs pairs or framed bundles, resp. (unencoded version)