Article PreviewArticle PreviewArticle PreviewIn this work, we have studied the crystal defectiveness and doping activation subsequent to ion implantation and post-annealing by using various techniques including photoluminescence (PL), Raman spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The aim of this work was to test the effectiveness of double step annealing to reduce the density of point defects generated during the annealing of a P implanted 4H-SiC epitaxial layer. The outcome of this work evidences that neither the first 1 hour isochronal annealing at 1650-1700-1750 C, nor the second one at 1500 C for times between 4 hour and 14 hour were able to recover a satisfactory crystallinity of the sample and achieve dopant activations exceeding 1%.