Theory of the quantum Hall smectic phase. II. Microscopic theory

We present a microscopic derivation of the hydrodynamic theory of the quantum Hall smectic or stripe phase of a two-dimensional electron gas in a large magnetic field. The effective action of the low-energy state is derived here from a microscopic picture by integrating out high-energy excitations with a scale of the order of the cyclotron energy. The remaining low-energy theory can be expressed in terms of two canonically conjugate sets of degrees of freedom: the displacement field that describes the fluctuations of the shapes of the stripes and the local charge fluctuations on each stripe.