In this contribution we revisit the lattice discretization of the topological charge for abelian lattice field theories. The construction departs from an initially non-compact discretization of the gauge fields and after absorbing $2pi$ shifts of the
gauge fields leads to a generalized Villain action that also includes the topological term. The topological charge in two, as well as in four dimensions can be expressed in terms of only the integer-valued Villain variables. We test various properties of the topological charge and in particular analyze the index theorem in two dimensions and discuss the Witten effect in 4-d. As an application of our formulation we present results from a simulation of the 2-d U(1) gauge Higgs model at vacuum angle $theta = pi$, where we use a suitable worldline/worldsheet representation to overcome the complex action problem at non-zero $theta$.
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 severa
l 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.
We present excited meson masses from quenched calculations using chirally improved (CI) quarks at pion masses down to 350 MeV. The salient features of our analysis are the use of a matrix of correlators from various source and sink operators and a ba
sis which includes quark sources with different spatial widths, thereby improving overlap with states exhibiting radial excitations.
