Geological Chronicle
Davisson is on the Moon’s far side, across the eastern rim of the huge walled plain Leibnitz. Its rim and outer rampart intrude into Leibnitz’s interior floor. Oppenheimer lies east-northeast and is described as somewhat smaller than Leibnitz. Outer rampart intrudes into Leibnitz’s interior floor.
The crater dates to the Nectarian period. Impacts have somewhat eroded its rim, which retains some detail from its original formation. Some terraces appear along the western face of the interior wall; the northeastern rim is more worn, while the northern and southern rim are more irregular. Basalt covers the relatively level, featureless floor. A low central peak sits slightly southwest of the crater midpoint, and its spectra fit a peridotite mineralogy, a material excavated from a depth of 8.7 to 13.8 km. peak sits slightly southwest.
The crater is named after Clinton Joseph Davisson, a US physicist who made the first experimental observation of the wave-like nature of electrons in 1927. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937. The International Astronomical Union adopted the crater’s name in 1970; before then, it was known as Crater 377. The name was formally adopted in 1970.