How diodes, LEDs and solar panels work

this video is a standalone explanation of how diodes leds and solar panels work if that's what you have to keep watching but it's also the second part of a two-part series if you want to see a video of diodes doing weird things then check out part one first the link is in the card there and in the description the purpose of a diode is to restrict to the flow of electricity in a circuit electricity can only flow in one direction through a diode that's the point of it and there's a couple of ways basically to make a diode the old-fashioned way with vacuum tubes or the modern way with semiconductors and this video explains the modern way of doing it because semiconductor diodes are so much more than simple one-way valves for electricity diodes are made by pushing two little bits of semiconductor together and to figure out what happens when you do that you need to understand covalent bonds so you might know that atoms like to have eight electrons in their outer shell with some exceptions and yes i am anthropomorphizing the atom atoms don't actually like to have eight electrons in the outer shell but i actually think anthropomorphizing is fine so long as everyone knows that you're doing it and that it's a shorthand for a more complex process also i'm gonna do it a lot more so strap in if you've got an atom of say fluorine that has seven electrons in its outer shell when it's neutral then it wants one more so if there's another fluorine nearby they can come together and share an electron each so look in the crossover between the two outer shells there's these two electrons so now this atom has eight electrons in the outer shell and this atom has h electrons in the outer shell and they're both happy i'm not even going to do air quotes so that is the covalent bond of a fluorine molecule f2 but think about silicon now silicon has four electrons in its outer shell so it needs to share the four that it has with four more silicon atoms surrounding it and those four atoms around it need to have silicon atoms around them so that they can have full shells and those atoms need to have atoms around them so they can have full ...