Scandium nitride, an emerging rocksalt indirect bandgap semiconductor, has attracted much interest recently for thermoelectricity, infrared plasmon and phonon-polaritons, neuromorphic computing, and Schottky diode device applications. As-deposited ScN thin films exhibit a high electron concentration due to oxygen impurities and nitrogen vacancies. Magnesium hole doping is the only effective method to compensate for high electron concentration and achieve $p$-type ScN. However, it is crucial to identify other hole doping strategies for ScN to promote its diverse applications. Here, we show conclusive experimental evidence of ion-implanted carbon as a hole dopant in ScN, reducing electron concentration by more than an order of magnitude. Through comprehensive spectroscopic and microscopic characterization techniques and first-principles modeling, we show that carbon occupies nitrogen sites in ScN for low dopant concentrations, leading to a hole-doping nature that compensates for ScN's high electron concentration. However, as carbon concentration increases, its hole doping ability reduces due to the formation of donor-type defect complexes identified from first-principles modeling analysis. Our work marks the experimental demonstration of hole doping in ScN with carbon ion-implantation and presents a pathway to tune the electron concentration in ScN for device applications.

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• Defects
• Doping effects
• Doped semiconductors
• Nitrides
• Semiconductors
• Thin films
• Band structure methods
• DFT+U
• Epitaxy
• Ion implantation
• Transmission electron microscopy
• X-ray absorption spectroscopy
• X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy