At Los Alamos, he met Professor Robert Williams, who later recruited him to teach at the University of Washington.
[citation needed] He acquired a huge magnet from Navy surplus, built a cloud chamber and a set of Geiger counters and designed a universal-focus camera to record cosmic ray events.
Then he designed and built an early electronic computer to record and sort the events according to energy, mass, charge, direction and frequency.
Davisson was a member of the University of Washington's team which designed a system for detecting subatomic particles known as muons.
After the U.S. government pulled the funding on the Superconducting Super Collider project, the team was recruited by CERN to help build part of the muon detector of the ATLAS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, in which Davisson took part, e.g., creating tools to test the detector tubes and as a liaison between the University of Washington's team and the rest of the collaborating group.