Creating Photovoltaic Solar Cells [closed]








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I have a friend who recently bought gallium off of Amazon (just for kicks, I have no idea why). I remember seeing that they use a form of gallium to treat photovoltaic solar cells. That got me thinking: how are PV solar cells created? I remember that they are made of a substance like silicon (I do not know exactly what it is) but the descriptions I read about the solar cells were fairly vague. Can anyone give me a more detailed explanation?




What about a [general overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell) about solar cells, and their principal [working principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_solar_cells) on wikipedia? NREL is one of the better known, international visible labs working on this, with public information [provided here](https://www.nrel.gov/pv/), like the regularly updated chart below:


[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2rzg8.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2rzg8.png)


If you want to dive deeper into this topic, there are even on-line classes about sub-topics in this field, like about the emerging [organic solar cells](https://www.coursera.org/learn/solar-cell). The topic is too broad, has too many ramifications, to be answered here.


As a side note, inorganic solar cells based on materials like metallic silicon start from highly purified materials. Hence I doubt metals available at Amazon were pure enough to build a PV cell able to compete with commercially available modules.


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