  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. While 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 pico- or even nanosecond laser systems in sight.
