Orientational pinning of quantum Hall striped phase

In ultra-clean 2D electron systems on (001) GaAs/AlGaAs upon filling high Landau levels, it was recently observed a new class of collective states, which can be related to the spontaneous formation of a charge density wave (striped phase''). We address to the following unsolved problem: what is the reason for stripe pinning along the crystallographic direction [110]? It is shown that in a single heterojunction (001) III-V the effective mass of 2D electrons is anisotropic. This natural anisotropy is due to the reduced (C_{2v}) symmetry of the heterojunction and, even being weak (0.1 percent), can govern the stripe direction. A magnetic field parallel to the interface induces magnetic’’ anisotropy of the effective mass. The competition of these two types of anisotropy provides quantitative description of the experiment.