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Solar Cell Introduction Solar Cells are used to convert available light into electrical energy. They do this without the use of chemical reactions. This conversion process is based on the work done by a French physicist named Alexander Becquerel in 1839. He discovered the photoelectric effect which describes the release of positive and negative charge carriers in a solid state when light hits its surface. He found, when experimenting with an electrolytic cell made up of two metal electrodes, that some materials would produce small amounts of current when exposed to light. Fifty years later a scientist named Charles Fritts created the first real solar cell using junctions by coating the semiconductor with a nearly transparent layer of gold. A semiconductor is a material such as silicon or germanium, where the material has properties which fall between conductors and insulators. However the efficiency of this conversion of light to electricity was less than...

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