George William Series FRS (22 February 1920 – 2 January 1995) was a British physicist, notable for his work on the optical spectroscopy of hydrogen atoms.
[1] His PhD thesis is titled Applications of high resolution spectroscopy to problems of atomic structure and his supervisor was Heinrich Gerhard Kuhn.
[4] In the 1950s and 1960s he exploited techniques developed by Alfred Kastler's research group in Paris and demonstrated that radiation from a coherent superposition of excited states of atoms would display interference effects, known as 'quantum beats'.
Series met his wife Annette (daughter of John Edward Pepper, a civil servant) at Oxford; she read modern languages at St Hilda's College, and they were married on 21 December 1948.
They had four children: three sons Robert, John, and Hugh, and a daughter Caroline, who is a notable mathematician and fellow of the Royal Society.