Solar Energy Science & Architectures - New course for Fall 2009
	The Physics Department will offer this class as PHY 300; it has been designed to meet the requirement for science courses by the Liberal Arts Core. The class will address questions like these: How much solar energy is available on earth? What are solar energy's properties, and how do the properties vary around the earth, from season to season, and during each day? How does solar energy compare to the energy from mined resources such as coal and oil? What are the devices that we can use to harvest solar energy to make electricity, to heat homes, and to make fuels? How do they work? Can we make them work better? Can we design buildings and other structures to better exploit solar energy? What are the costs of the differing architectures for harvesting solar energy, and how do they compare with the costs of other forms of energy? How can we predict these costs into the future? While these questions involve applied science, they offer windows onto fundamental principles that will also be introduced in this course. Some examples: the spectrum of colors in sunlight is connected to the spectrum of heat-radiation emitted by a house. Solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity, utilize the photoelectric effect; Albert Einstein got his Nobel Prize for explaining it. The costs of manufacturing new devices like solar cells or solar windows go down with time; these costs often follow a learning curve that we can use to estimate the future cost of a technology.
http://www.nrel.gov/data/pix/Jpegs/12344.jpg	Short description: Properties and fundamental principles of solar energy; principles of devices and architectures for utilizing solar energy; costs and future of solar energy technologies. Credit hours: 3 Course number: 31868 Meets: Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-1:50 PM in room B126 Physics. Co-requisite: This class is open to students who are taking (or have previously taken) any calculus class. There are no other prerequisite physics (or other) classes. Course requirements: There will be readings, homework, and examinations on the quantitative aspects of the course. Students will also research a related subject and present their findings at a poster session. Instructor: Eric Schiff is a physics professor who has been doing solar cell research for about 20 years. You can reach him at his syr.edu e-mail account (user easchiff), or take a look at his webpage http://physics.syr.edu/~schiff .
Syracuse University, rev. August 19, 2009.