Summary

Within the Standard Model of particle physics, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) de-scribes the strong interaction between particles carrying color charge. The basic con-stituents of the theory are quarks and gluons. From these fundamental degrees of free-dom, color-neutral composite particles are formed. In a simple quark model view, these are mesons, which are bound states of a quark and an antiquark, and baryons, which consist of one quark of each of the three colors. In the relativistic quantum field the-ory, these hadrons may also contain gluonic excitations or additional quark-antiquark pairs. In this thesis, we study hadrons from an ab initio calculation in a discrete, four-dimensional Euclidean space-time. A discrete lattice is introduced to regularize the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics which enables us to calculate observables using numerical techniques developed in the context of statistical mechanics. The parameters of the theory are the inverse gauge coupling β and the masses for each quark flavor. For practical calculations, only the light quarks are treated dynamically and one either uses two mass-degenerate light quarks (up and down quarks) or includes the somewhat heavier strange quark in the simulations and works with 2+1 flavors of quarks