In 2003, a Memorandum of Understanding between CERN and the Government of New Zealand concerning the further development of scientific and technical cooperation in high-energy physics was signed.

A New Zealand team from the universities of Auckland and Canterbury has been a member of the CMS Collaboration for several years, making useful contributions to the Beam-Loss Monitoring system, Grid computing and heavy-ion physics, and the Canterbury group has also joined the Medipix Collaboration and have developed the MARS (Medipix All Resolution System) scanner, a computer tomography system. The scanner incorporates technology developed from the LHC by the Medipix Collaboration and is the first stage in an ongoing collaboration including CERN, the Czech Technical University and the universities of Canterbury and Otago in New Zealand.