Abstract :
Local quark–hadron duality violations in conventional applications of the operator product expansion are proposed to have their origin in the fact that the QCD vacuum or a hadronic state is not only characterized by nonvanishing expectation values of local, gauge invariant operators but also by finite correlation lengths of the corresponding gauge invariant n-point functions. Utilizing high-resolution lattice information on these correlators a non-perturbative component of OPE coarse graining is proposed which, in principle, allows for a determination of the critical dimension where the break-down of the expansion sets in.