Infrared behavior of gluons and ghosts in ghost-antighost symmetric gauges

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 behaviour of these two-point functions is studied in a bare-vertex truncation scheme which has proven to be successful in Landau gauge. In all linear covariant gauges the same infrared behaviour as in Landau gauge is found: The gluon propagator is infrared suppressed whereas the ghost propagator is infrared enhanced. This infrared singular behaviour provides indication against a ghost-antighost condensate. In the ghost-antighost symmetric gauges we find that the infrared behaviour of the gluon and ghost propagators cannot be determined when replacing all dressed vertices by bare ones. The question of a BRST invariant dimension two condensate remains to be further studied.