Green's Functions and Topological Configurations

There are, among others, currently two important views on the non-perturbative structure of Yang-Mills theory. One is through topological configurations and one is through Green's functions, in particular their (asymptotic) infrared behavior. Based on both views, various scenarios for confinement, chiral symmetry breaking and other non-perturbative effects have been developed. However, if both views are correct then they can only be different aspects of the same underlying physics, and it must be possible to relate them. After discussing the current status of the understanding of this connection, smeared and cooled configurations in lattice gauge theory are used to determine the properties of Green's functions in the low-momentum regime. It is found that the qualitative properties are essentially unchanged compared to results on unsmeared configurations. This is also the case when the configurations are smeared sufficiently strongly to reach the almost (anti-)self-dual domain.