Hadron properties in QCD with two dynamical quark flavors

I present the essential results of my doctoral thesis, which was done in the field of lattice QCD. This work can be seen as one of the cornerstones of a long-ranging project, started already at the beginning of the year 2000. Since then, several groups, associated in the Bern-Graz-Regensburg(BGR) collaboration, continuously worked on that project. In this report I will discuss results on various sectors of lattice QCD. There,seven sets of gauge field configurations with a lattice size of 163 x 32 and a spatial extent of about 2.2 fm have been created; the pion masses are ranging from 602 MeV down to 257 MeV. The configurations include two mass degenerate dynamical light quarks; the Luescher-Weisz gauge action and the Chirally Improved Dirac operator have been used. In each set 200 or 300 uncorrelated configurations are available for analyses.The results are located in three different fields. An analysis of low energy parameters was done, to be more precise, the axial Ward-identity mass and (the pion and kaon) decay constants have been investigated. The experimentally accessible value for the ratio of these decay constants is in full agreement with the value obtained here. The second area of research was concerning the angular momentum decomposition of the vector meson rho. In our approach it could be shown that the first excited state of the rho meson is not a pure S wave state, which is contrary to the quark model. The main focus of this work was based on hadron spectroscopy. This task was done using the variational method. A broad spectrum of baryons and mesons could be covered here. Also hadrons including strange quarks have been analyzed, however, the strange quark being a partially quenched strange quark. Generally speaking, the studied hadron channels compare nicely to the experimental values. (author)