Periodicity in Al/Ti superconducting single electron transistors

We present experiments on single Cooper-pair transistors made of two different superconducting materials. We chose Ti and Al to create an energy gap profile such that the island has a higher gap than the leads, thereby acting as a barrier to quasiparticle tunneling. Our transport measurements demonstrate that quasiparticle poisoning is suppressed in all our TiAlTi structures (higher gap for the island) with clear 2 e periodicity observed, whereas full quasiparticle poisoning is observed in all AlTiAl devices (higher gap for the leads) with e periodicity.