The carrier injection into a carbon nanotube, contacted by a metal coating over an arbitrary length, is studied by various means: Microscopic ab initio calculations of the nanotube-metal interface allow us to extract --for Ti and Pd as contacting materials-- realistic parameters, which are then used in large scale tight-binding models for transport calculations. A minimal model allows an exact analytic solution which can be related to the original system with high precision. The results are shown to be robust against non-epitaxially grown electrodes and disorder at the interface in general, as well as various refinements of the model.

[1] N. Nemec, D. Tomnek, and G. Cuniberti, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 076802 (2006) [cond-mat/0512396]