To investigate the possibility of a ghost-antighost condensate, the coupled Dyson-Schwinger equations for the gluon and ghost propagators in Yang-Mills theories are derived in general covariant gauges, including ghost-antighost symmetric gauges. The infrared behavior of these two-point functions is studied in a bare-vertex truncation scheme which has proven to be successful in the Landau gauge. In all linear covariant gauges the same infrared behavior as in the Landau gauge is found: The gluon propagator is infrared-suppressed whereas the ghost propagator is infrared-enhanced. This infrared singular behavior provides an indication against a ghost-antighost condensate. In the ghost-antighost symmetric gauges we find that the infrared behavior of the gluon and ghost propagators cannot be determined when replacing all dressed vertices by bare ones. The question of a BRS invariant dimension-2 condensate remains to be further studied.

• Received 16 April 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.68.045003