Designed by Ted Bowen, Burt Pifer and Ken Kendall of the University of Arizona, the first "surface muon beam" was used at the LBL 184" Synchrocyclotron to seach for spontaneous muonium-antimuonium conversion in vacuum.
The group used a hot molybdenum foil to "boil off" muonium atoms into vacuum, a technique now being adapted at the BOOM facility of the KEK laboratory in Japan for production of slow µ+ beams in vacuum.
The "Arizona Beam" was later used by Don Fleming's group from UBC to study the chemical reactions of muonium atoms in gases.
The muonium-antimuonium search was later continued at TRIUMF by John B. Warren's group using Cab-O-Sil powders and silica aerogel to generate muonium atoms in vacuum.