Lucabindiite is a mineral discovered in 1998 from the La Fossa crater at Vulcano, the Aeolian islands off the coast of Italy.
After months of collecting sublimates and encrustations, the researchers discovered lucabindiite which was found on the surface of pyroclastic breccia.
The researchers discovered a minute amount of crystals of lucabindiite, therefore they could not perform a direct measurement of the refractive index.
The mineral is very brittle, shows no signs of cleavage, parting or fracture patterns, and hardness was not determined.
A quantitative analysis was performed using energy dispersive spectroscopy due to the small sample size of 100 μm smeared on a 30 nm thick film of carbon.