Temporal quality of post-compressed pulses at large compression factors

Post-compression of ultra-short laser pulses via self-phase modulation is routinely employed for the generation with optical bandwidths reaching far beyond gain limitations. Although high compression factors can be achieved, compressed typically suffer from temporal quality degradation. We numerically and experimentally analyze deterioration different measures increasing factor show how appropriate dispersion management cascading post-compression process to limit impact this effect. The demonstrated saturation pulse degradation at large puts novel femtosecond architectures based on post-compressed picosecond or even nanosecond systems in sight.