Spontaneous freeze out of dark matter

We present a new paradigm for the production of dark-matter particles called the spontaneous freeze out, in which the decoupling from the thermal bath is enforced by the sudden increase of the dark-matter mass, due to the spontaneous breaking of some global symmetry rather than by the slow decrease of the temperature. We study the details of the spontaneous freeze out mechanism using a simple toy model and analyze the phenomenology of our scenario. We show that in order to obtain the correct relic abundance, the annihilation cross section of dark-matter particles into Standard-Model states has to be typically much larger than in the case of a constant-mass thermal dark-matter candidate. We present a string theory model in which such a scenario takes place naturally.