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Yep, the middle part has all of its electrons right where they want to be so it resists further movement.

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Is it that the sunlight hits the undoped silicon --> an electron now leaves that depletion zone and a hole is created there(?) (this part I'm confused about)
The hole is simply the absence of an electron that's supposed to be there if it were in an equilibrium state. So yes, if an electron gets forced out by a photon, it leaves a hole behind where it used to be.

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and somehow it's the bottom p-type layer that now has a hole, maybe because it moved an electron up to the depletion zone because electrons prefer to move in one direction
Bingo.

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as the electrons from the N-type layer are attracted to the P-type layer?
Through the circuit (on the left side of the picture), yes.

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Why is it that there are two arrows coming out of the "Photon Absorbed in Depletion Zone Electron-hole Creation"?
One arrow represents the path of the electron. One arrow represents the path of the hole left behind. Nothing fancier than that.

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And..the photon just bypasses the N-layer and goes to the Depletion zone :o?
If it helps with understanding, consider that the primary component of window glass is silicon, and you see photons pass right through THAT all the time.

Photons with too low of energy to dislodge an electron end up just passing right through. Higher-energy photons are more likely to interact. Some energetic photons will get unlucky and hit an electron near the surface of the panel, sending an electron spinning around in the region where it's already happy to float around, and nothing significant happens except the panel gets a little bit warmer (like EVERYTHING does when you shine light on it). But since silicon is still somewhat transparent at those slightly-higher energies, some photons aren't going to bump into anything until they're deeper into the material, and those are the ones that make electricity.

Your intuition might be saying this already, so let me validate it: Yes, solar cells are actually very inefficient, and most photons that land on them don't get converted into electricity. You need huge arrays of thousands of solar cells to generate enough energy to power a house. But we don't really care all that much about that inefficiency, because those photons weren't going to be doing us much good anyway.


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Unfortunately, I don't even know what a computer chip does nor where it is :/. Um, what is a "chip"?

"Chip" is slang for "integrated circuit," of which the most important one in your computer is the CPU (or "processor"). They're the (usually black) rectangular things stuck to circuit boards, and they're full of micro-printed silicon wafers to create complex circuits. I would recommend against digging any deeper into this at the moment because it spirals VERY VERY QUICKLY into mindboggling complexity. Suffice to say that modern technology is printing individual details only a few atoms wide and we're very very close to hitting fundamental quantum-scale limitations on how small we can make things and still have them work.
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Old Posted 02-05-2017, 05:00 AM Reply With Quote