Femtosecond Solid Dynamics Lab of Prof. Chowdhury has participated in the world-wide Thin Film Laser damage competition at the 48^th Boulder Laser Damage Symposium (world’s longest running laser conference) as the official Damage Testing Facility for 2015 and 2016.  They worked with the Laser Damage group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to set the protocol and analysis for testing the most advanced high damage threshold broad-band dielectric reflective coatings for high power laser applications available in the world, to be used in next generation billion dollar laser facilities like the European Extreme Light Infrastructure, or ELI ( three facilities: www.eli-beams.eu,  www.eli-hu.hu, www.eli-np.ro) pushing physics frontiers of nonlinear QED, atto-second science and nuclear physics. This year, 19 different companies/research facilities from three continents sent 42 of their most advanced samples to be tested in the competition. The result and winning ultra-fast high reflector of the competition was announced at the Boulder Damage Symposium last week (25^th-28^th September, 2016). More information about this work can be found in https://spie.org/conferences-and-exhibitions/laser-damage and http://spie.org/Publications/Proceedings/Paper/10.1117/12.2195592.

This work was partially supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.