  Analytic calculations in the infrared regime of nonabelian gauge theories are
hampered by the presence of Gribov copies which results in some ambiguity in
the gauge-fixing procedure. This problem shares strong similarities with the
issue of finding the true ground state among a large number of metastable
states, a typical situation in the field of statistical physics of disordered
systems. Building on this analogy, we propose a new gauge-fixing procedure
which, we argue, makes more explicit the influence of the Gribov copies. A
1-loop calculation shows that the dynamics of these copies can lead to the
spontaneous generation of a gauge-dependent gluon mass.
