  Carrier injection into carbon nanotubes and graphene nanoribbons, contacted
by a metal coating over an arbitrary length, is studied by various means:
Minimal models allow for exact analytic solutions which can be transferred to
the original system with high precision. Microscopic ab initio calculations of
the electronic structure at the carbon-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. The
results are shown to be robust against nonepitaxially grown electrodes and
general disorder at the interface, as well as various refinements of the model.
