Manifestly Covariant Polynomial M5-brane Lagrangians

Abstract

We present polynomial and manifestly covariant M5-brane Lagrangians along with their analyses involving their dynamics, gauge symmetries and their nonlinear selfduality condition. Such Lagrangians can be particularly useful for developments that are otherwise hindered by a non-polynomial structure and singularity of the Lagrangian such as its quantisation. Although on integrating out some of the auxiliary fields these polynomial Lagrangians reduce to the M5-brane Lagrangian given by the Pasti-Sorokin-Tonin (PST) formalism, in the analysis of the polynomial Lagrangians the only remnant of the non-polynomial structure of the PST type Lagrangian appears in the gauge transformation corresponding to an infinitesimal shift of a St\"uckelberg field. This transformation does not affect the dynamics or the on-shell self-duality condition of the polynomial M5-brane Lagrangians.