First results with two light flavours of quarks with maximally twisted mass

We report on first results of an ongoing effort to simulate lattice QCD with two degenerate flavours of quarks by means of the twisted mass formulation tuned to maximal twist. By utilising recent improvements of the HMC algorithm, pseudo-scalar masses well below 300 MeV are simulated on volumes with spatial size larger than 2 fm at values of the lattice spacing similar or smaller than 0.1 fm. We present first evidence that scaling violations in the pseudo-scalar decay constant are small and well compatible with O(a) improvement. Additionally, exploratory results for the case of N_f=2+1+1 flavours are discussed.