George William Series

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.

Series was born in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire, the son of William Series (1892–1959) and his wife Alice (1889–1976), née Crosthwaite. Aged ten he won a scholarship to Queen Mary's Grammar School, Basingstoke, and later to Reading School. In 1938 he was awarded an open scholarship and matriculated at St John's College, Oxford, where he graduated with first class honours in 1947, his studies having been interrupted by the Second World War (during the war Series, a conscientious objector, served with the Friends' Ambulance Unit in Egypt, Italy, and Yugoslavia). He took his MA and DPhil from Oxford in 1950.

Series became a university lecturer in 1951 and a fellow of St Edmund Hall in 1954. During this time he studied the structure of the hydrogen atom, becoming 'a world authority on the subject'. 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'. A group of important papers on this subject brought Series international recognition.

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