Carbon-based hybrid materials: growth, characterization and investigation of properties

The structural versatility of carbon allotropes offers a variety of opportunities to employ them in diverse applications both as a pristine material and as building block in composite materials. Carbon nanotubes, carbon nanofibers and graphene can serve to engineer the physical and chemical properties of carbon-based hybrid architectures and devices. These hybrid functional systems have a great potential to become the driving force of the technology of the future. The research work presented in this thesis had a focus on the synthesis of aligned and unaligned single-walled carbon nanotubes to understand the intertube interactions for opto-electronic device applications. Further, successful design, synthesis and characterization of functional composite materials based on carbon nanofibers and graphene has been achieved.