New insights on non-perturbative Yang-Mills

In this talk we review some recent results on the infrared properties of the gluon and ghost propagators in pure Yang-Mills theories. These results are obtained from the corresponding Schwinger-Dyson equation formulated in a special truncation scheme, which preserves gauge invariance. The presence of massless poles in the three gluon vertex triggers the generation of a dynamical gluon mass (Schwinger mechanism in d=4), which gives rise to an infrared finite gluon propagator and ghost dressing function. As a byproduct of this analysis we calculate the Kugo-Ojima function, required for the definition of the non-perturbative QCD effective charge within the pinch technique framework. We show that the numerical solutions of these non-perturbative equations are in very good agreement with the results of SU(3) lattice simulations.