Effective Field Theory of Relativistic Quantum Hall Systems

Motivated by the observation of the fractional quantum Hall effect in graphene, we consider the effective field theory of relativistic quantum Hall states. We find that, beside the Chern-Simons term, the effective action also contains a term of topological nature, which couples the electromagnetic field with a topologically conserved current of $2+1$ dimensional relativistic fluid. In contrast to the Chern-Simons term, the new term involves the spacetime metric in a nontrivial way. We extract the predictions of the effective theory for linear electromagnetic and gravitational responses. For fractional quantum Hall states at the zeroth Landau level, additional holomorphic constraints allow one to express the results in terms of two dimensionless constants of topological nature.