Recent unambiguous experiments (melting of ultrafine particles, premelting at the surface of
a bulk crystal, superheating, etc.) offer clear evidence of the key role of the surface in
determining the melting of a material. In this work we concentrate our attention on spherical
and non-spherical nanometric lead inclusions. We report experimental results on Pb/SiO
and Pb/Al2O3 systems obtained at different temperatures by two techniques: high-sensitivity
optical reflectance and dark-field electron microscopy. The main result is the existence …