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 of laser pulses with optical bandwidths reaching far beyond the laser gain limitations. Although high compression factors can be routinely achieved, the compressed pulses typically suffer from temporal quality degradation. We numerically and experimentally analyze the deterioration of different measures of temporal quality with increasing compression factor and show how appropriate dispersion management and cascading of the post-compression process can be employed to limit the impact of this effect. The demonstrated saturation of pulse quality degradation at large compression factors puts novel femtosecond laser architectures based on post-compressed picosecond or even nanosecond laser systems in sight. Published by Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.