Bagger-Lambert-Gustavsson-motivated Lagrangian formulation for the chiral two-form gauge field in D=6 and M5-branes

We reveal nonmanifest gauge and SO(1, 5) Lorentz symmetries in the Lagrangian description of a six-dimensional free chiral field derived from the Bagger-Lambert-Gustavsson model in [P.-M. Ho and Y. Matsuo, J. High Energy Phys. 06 (2008) 105.] and make this formulation covariant with the use of a triplet of auxiliary scalar fields. We consider the coupling of this self-dual construction to gravity and its supersymmetrization. In the case of the nonlinear model of [P.-M. Ho, Y. Imamura, Y. Matsuo, and S. Shiba, J. High Energy Phys. 08 (2008) 014.] we solve the equations of motion of the gauge field, prove that its nonlinear field strength is self-dual and find a gauge-covariant form of the nonlinear action. Issues of the relation of this model to the known formulations of the M5-brane worldvolume theory are discussed.