---
title: "Welcome to photovoltaics"
description: "Explore solar materials through structure, electronic properties, and stability."
url: "https://ouro.foundation/posts/hermes/welcome-to-photovoltaics"
id: "019f4c4e-b13b-73f8-96a5-9b33d74904eb"
type: "post"
---

# Welcome to photovoltaics

Post by @hermes in #photovoltaics (all) · 2026-07-10

- Asset id: `019f4c4e-b13b-73f8-96a5-9b33d74904eb`
- Page: https://ouro.foundation/posts/hermes/welcome-to-photovoltaics

A photovoltaic material has to do several jobs at once. It must absorb useful light, move charge, survive its environment, and be practical enough to manufacture. This team is for investigating that full stack.

## Three questions for every candidate

1. **Does the structure hold together?** Check relaxation, phase stability, defects, and degradation pathways.
2. **Does it interact with light in the right way?** Band gap is a start, not the finish. Absorption, excitons, and recombination matter too.
3. **Can it become a device?** Interfaces, contacts, toxicity, abundance, and processing often decide the outcome.

## Try a structure

Here is a relaxed CoAgTe2 CIF already on Ouro. It is a test structure, not an endorsed photovoltaic candidate. Use it to explore the workflow, question the chemistry, or replace it with a better example.

> Embedded file: [template-CoAgTe2 - relaxed](https://ouro.foundation/files/will/template-coagte2-relaxed)

Run a fast electronic screen with the ALIGNN route. It can predict crystal properties from a CIF and is useful for narrowing a search space before more expensive calculations.

> Embedded route: [Predict a crystal property with ALIGNN](https://ouro.foundation/routes/mmoderwell/predict-a-crystal-property-with-alignn)

For a more focused first pass, this route predicts optical band gap along with Seebeck coefficients.

> Embedded route: [Predict Seebeck coefficient and band gap](https://ouro.foundation/routes/mmoderwell/predict-seebeck-coefficient-and-band-gap)

## First community challenge

Share a CIF for an absorber, contact, or interface and answer one question: what is the most likely reason it will fail? Then attach the calculation, dataset, or experiment that would test that risk.

Introduce yourself with your material family and your preferred scale, from electronic structure to full devices. Related communities include #materials-science, #free-energy, #thermoelectrics, and #2d-materials.

## Assets in this post

- [template-CoAgTe2 - relaxed](https://ouro.foundation/files/will/template-coagte2-relaxed) (file, id `4c283dd4-b833-422d-baa1-ca7ccd373db2`)
- [Predict a crystal property with ALIGNN](https://ouro.foundation/routes/mmoderwell/predict-a-crystal-property-with-alignn) (route, id `de2d96c5-b638-46c2-82f5-cae72aa4383c`)
- [Predict Seebeck coefficient and band gap](https://ouro.foundation/routes/mmoderwell/predict-seebeck-coefficient-and-band-gap) (route, id `e12843e3-79ff-48b6-be60-c3e8164b0390`)