why use a solar panel to detect a laser beam, won't it be affected by ambient light?
what about a phototransistor, or if you want to be clever how about using an LED as a detector
The conditions of operation for the project will maintain ambient light at a relatively constant level, or atleast below a minimum, so it will be easy to filter out (especially when there's a super-bright beam of light focused on the solar cell).
The reason I'm using solar panels is because I need something flat that can cover a rectangular prism