In this work we study the predominantly orbital and radial excitations of hadrons containing a single heavy quark. We present meson and baryon mass splittings and ratios of meson decay constants (e.g., $f_{B_s}/f_B$ and $f_{B_s}/f_{B_s}$) resulting f
rom quenched and dynamical two-flavor configurations. Light quarks are simulated using the chirally improved (CI) lattice Dirac operator at valence masses as light as $M_pi approx 350$ MeV. The heavy quark is approximated by a static propagator, appropriate for the $b$ quark on our lattices ($1/a sim 1-2$ GeV). We also include some preliminary calculations of the $O(1/m_Q^{})$ kinetic corrections to the states, showing, in the process, a viable way of applying the variational method to three-point functions involving excited states. We compare our results with recent experimental findings.
We simulate two dynamical, mass degenerate light quarks on 16^3x32 lattices with a spatial extent of 2.4 fm using the Chirally Improved Dirac operator. The simulation method, the implementation of the action and signals of equilibration are discussed
in detail. Based on the eigenvalues of the Dirac operator we discuss some qualitative features of our approach. Results for ground state masses of pseudoscalar and vector mesons as well as for the nucleon and delta baryons are presented.
