The ceremony was attended by 200 scientists and officials from 31 countries, including a Croatian delegation led by the head of Split University, Ivan Pavic, and a state secretary at the Science and Education Ministry, Drazen Vikic Topic.
The first stage of construction of the CMS detector started in 1992, with a group of physicists from Split University joining the project already in 1993. They were later joined by physicists from the Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Zagreb.
Thanks to cooperation between scientists from Split and Zagreb and with support from the Ministry of Science and Education, the Institute for Electrotechnics of the "Koncar" company won a 600 million Swiss franc contract to build a part of the CMS detector.
In 2005, Koncar received a CERN award as best industrial subcontractor.
The CMS detector serves to record high-energy proton-proton collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is the world's biggest accelerator with a 27-kilometre circumference that is being built below the ground on the Swiss-French border.