Anomalous Thermal Hall Effect in an Insulating van der Waals Magnet

Two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) magnets have been a fertile playground for the discovery and exploration of physical phenomena and new physics. In this Letter, we report the observation of an anomalous thermal Hall effect (THE) with κ_{xy}∼1×10^{-2} W K^{-1} m^{-1} in an insulating van der Waals ferromagnet VI_{3}. The thermal Hall signal persists in the absence of an external magnetic field and flips sign upon the switching of the magnetization. In combination with theoretical calculations, we show that VI_{3} exhibits a dual nature of the THE, i.e., dominated by topological magnons hosted by the ferromagnetic honeycomb lattice at higher temperatures and by phonons induced by the magnon-phonon coupling at lower temperatures. Our results not only position VI_{3} as the first ferromagnetic system to investigate both anomalous magnon and phonon THEs, but also render it as a potential platform for spintronics-magnonics applications.