Aluminum single-electron transistors studied at 0.3 K in different transport regimes

We measured the transport properties and charge noise of superconducting single-electron transistors at the temperature of 0.3 K. The devices were fabricated with different ratios between charging and Josephson energies in order to explore their behavior in different experimental situations. We show that, in spite of the substantial thermal fluctuation, it is possible to extract from the data the values of the device parameters and information on the various tunneling mechanisms. Furthermore, we measured the device noise at different bias points, corresponding to regions with different dominant tunneling mechanisms, namely in the supercurrent, in the Josephson quasiparticle, and in the sequential tunneling regions. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.