Towards an M5-brane model. Part III. Self-duality from additional trivial fields

We present a six-dimensional N = (1, 0) supersymmetric higher gauge theory in which self-duality is consistently implemented by physically trivial additional fields. The action contains both N = (1, 0) tensor and vector multiplets and is non-trivially interacting. The tensor multiplet part is loosely related to a recently proposed action by Sen that leads to on-shell self-duality in an elegant way. As we also show, Sen's action finds a very natural and direct interpretation from a homotopy algebraic perspective.