Physics of light quarks

Light quark spectroscopy is an exciting field with a lot of new information in the past decade from running experiments addressing the structure of the QCD mass spectrum. The main topics are the search for non-q-barq-states like glueballs, hybrids or multiquarks as well as the test of chiral theories and the low energy QCD. The first item, the search for exotic matter is discussed which is still going on. Many of them exhibit exotic features, like unusual quantum numbers or peculiar production and/or decay patterns. New high statistics experiments are able to disentangle complex structures which may lead us to a better understanding of the QCD mass spectrum. (author). 40 refs., 12 figs., 2 tabs