IR properties of Yang-Mills theories from the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism

The powerful quantization formalism of Batalin and Vilkovisky streamlines the derivation of the complete set of (non-linear) identities arising from the local BRST symmetry of Yang-Mills theories. When applied in the Background Field Method type of gauges, it also gives rise to identities which relate Green's functions involving background fields to Green's functions involving quantum fields. All these identities lie at the core of the recent progress in understanding from the continuum formulation the IR dynamics emerging from lattice simulations. In this talk, we will first review the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism and then apply it to the problem of extracting the effective charge from the available lattice data.