Direct comparision of the damage frequency method and binary search technique.

We present a direct comparison of two techniques for the determination of laser damage threshold. The two techniques are compared for their accuracy and repeatability and analyzed to understand the intrinsic biases of each test. We show that the damage frequency method underestimates the true value and has poor repeatability and the binary search method over-estimates the threshold, but is the more repeatable method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]