We investigate whether right-handed neutrinos can play the role of the dark matter of the Universe and be generated by the freeze-out production mechanism. In the standard picture, the requirement of a long lifetime of the right-handed neutrinos implies a small neutrino Yukawa coupling. As a consequence, they never reach thermal equilibrium, thus prohibiting production by freeze-out. We note that this limitation is alleviated if the neutrino Yukawa coupling is large enough in the early Universe to thermalize the sterile neutrinos, and then becomes tiny at a certain moment, which makes them drop out of equilibrium. As a concrete example realization of this framework, we consider a Froggatt-Nielsen model supplemented by an additional scalar field which obeys a global symmetry (not the flavour symmetry). Initially, the vacuum expectation value of the flavon is such, that the effective neutrino Yukawa coupling is large and unsuppressed, keeping them in thermal equilibrium. At some point the new scalar also gets a vacuum expectation value that breaks the symmetry. This may occur in such a way that the vev of the flavon is shifted to a new (smaller) value. In that case, the Yukawa coupling is reduced such that the sterile neutrinos are rendered stable on cosmological time scales. We show that this mechanism works for a wide range of sterile neutrino masses.
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