Over the last three years, a thin film laser damage competition has been held at the Boulder Damage Symposium in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the current state of high laser resistant thin films. Additionally the purpose of this series of competitions is to determine general trends regarding deposition methods and coating materials over a range of pulse lengths and wavelengths. In 2010, antireflection coatings were tested at 355 nm with a 7.5 ns pulse length since little work has been done in this area over the last few decades.

UV antireflection coatings are a challenging coating for high power laser applications. In order to understand the current laser resistance of UV AR coatings in the industrial and university sectors, a double blind laser damage competition was performed. Twenty-nine samples were tested in this competition from eleven different companies or institutes including famous Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA) and Laser Zentrum Hanover (Germany).

From Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM), the sol-gel porous silica AR coatings had the highest laser damage thresholds in all samples. The thresholds of the coated and uncoated samples were 47 J/cm2 and 23 J/cm2, respectively. The competition results introduced from Proc. of SPIE Vol. 7842 were illustrated in fig. 1.