To the east-northeast of Davisson is the walled plain Oppenheimer, a formation only somewhat smaller than Leibnitz.

The rim of Davisson has been somewhat eroded from impacts, but it retains some detail from its original formation.

The interior floor is relatively level and featureless, with a low central peak offset slightly to the southwest of the crater midpoint.

This crater is named after Clinton Joseph Davisson (1881–1958) a US physicist who in 1927 made the first experimental observation of the wave nature of electrons, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937.

With Lester Germer (1896–1971), Davisson discovered that electrons can undergo diffraction, in accordance with French physicist Louis de Broglie's theory that electrons and all other elementary particles can show wavelike behaviour.