Allowed excitation of unnatural-parity states in the 208Pb(4He, 6He) reaction

We consider, in the context of simple gauge models, the possibility that lepton number is a spontaneously broken global symmetry, leading to massive Majorana neutrinos. We find that the usual objections associated with global symmetry breakdown may be moot in this case since the Goldstone boson associated with lepton number breakdown - the majoron - is so weakly coupled to matter that it may have well escaped detection.