  We develop a concrete theory of continuous stripe melting quantum phase
transitions in two dimensional metals and the associated Fermi surface
reconstruction. Such phase transitions are strongly coupled but yet
theoretically tractable in situations where the stripe ordering is destroyed by
proliferating doubled dislocations of the charge stripe order. The resulting
non-Landau quantum critical point (QCP) has strong stripe fluctuations which we
show decouple dynamically from the Fermi surface even though static stripe
ordering reconstructs the Fermi surface. We discuss connections to various
stripe phenomena in the cuprates. We point out several puzzling aspects of old
experimental results (Aeppli et al, Science 1997) on singular stripe
fluctuations in the cuprates, and provide a possible explanation within our
theory. These results may thus have been the first observation of non-Landau
quantum criticality in an experiment.
