  The chirally improved (CI) fermion action allows us to obtain results for pion masses down to 320 MeV on (in lattice units) comparatively small lattices with physical extent of 2.4 fm. We use differently smeared quarks sources to build sets of several interpolators. The variational method then leads to excellent ground state masses for most mesons and baryons. The excited state signals weaken in quality towards smaller quark masses. In particular the excited baryons come out too high. 
Excited hadrons in n_f=2 QCD