Fundamentals of Photovoltaics
Solar cells turn light into electricity through a chain of physical steps: charge excitation, conduction, separation, and collection. This MIT OpenCourseWare course walks through that chain in detail, covering both commercial silicon technologies and emerging alternatives, along with the metrics used to judge them, including conversion efficiency, loss mechanisms, and characterization techniques. Lectures also address manufacturing processes, system design, reliability testing, and life-cycle and risk analysis, situating the technical material within markets, policy, and environmental context. The course is an elective in MIT's undergraduate Energy Studies Minor and part of OCW's broader Energy Courses collection, so it assumes some engineering or physics background. Materials include lecture notes and course readings as published on OCW; there is no instructor interaction or certificate, consistent with OCW's open self-study format. The scope runs from device physics to the policy landscape surrounding solar deployment.