To have abstract in the document class revtex?

revtex4-1 loads, amongst other packages, ltxfront to set up the front matter of the document. The following is taken from the Author's guide for revtex4-1 (section IV.4. The abstract, p 7; part of section IV. The Front Matter):

IV.4. The abstract

An abstract for a paper is specified by using the abstract environment:

\begin{abstract} Text of abstract \end{abstract} 

Note that in REVTeX 4.1 the abstract must be specified before the \maketitle command and there is no need to embed it in an explicit minipage environment.

So, use

\documentclass[twocolumn]{revtex4-1}% http://ctan.org/pkg/revtex4-1 \begin{document} \title{Hello world} \begin{abstract} % abstract The maximal \end{abstract} \maketitle \end{document} 

It becomes apparent that abstract doesn't exist after a call to \maketitle when viewing the definition of \frontmatter@maketitle in ltxfront.dtx:

\def\frontmatter@maketitle{% \@author@finish \title@column\titleblock@produce \suppressfloats[t]% \let\and\relax \let\affiliation\@gobble \let\author\@gobble \let\@AAC@list\@empty \let\@AFF@list\@empty \let\@AFG@list\@empty \let\@AF@join\@AF@join@error \let\email\@gobble \let\@address\@empty \let\maketitle\relax \let\thanks\@gobble \let\abstract\@undefined\let\endabstract\@undefined% ABSTRACT definitions removed \titlepage@sw{% \vfil \clearpage }{}% }%