[Tex/LaTex] Revtex multiple authors with no affiliations – how to put equal contribution as footnote

Question

I have a document with multiple authors. I normally add \affiliation{University Name} and \altaffiliation{These authors contributed equally to this work}. However, I now want to not display any affiliation but still have the equal contributions in the footnote of the first page. If I only use \altaffiliation I get a blank space, a comma and then the altaffiliation marker.

My MWE is below

\documentclass[aps,preprintnumbers,nofootinbib,superscriptaddress,11pt]{revtex4}
\begin{document}
\title{Blah Blah}
\author{Author 1}
\altaffiliation{These authors contributed equally to this work}
\author{Author 2}
\altaffiliation{These authors contributed equally to this work}
\author{Author 3}
\maketitle
text text text
\end{document}

As you can see, it doesn't work properly. If I use \affiliation instead of \altaffiliation it displays it right under the author list whereas I want it as a footnote.

Answer 1

You can put the symbol in the author names manually and use a footnote without corresponding symbol in the text using \footnotetext. To get the same symbol you can temporarily change the footnote symbol before the \footnotetext command and change it back afterwards.

MWE:

\documentclass[aps,preprintnumbers,nofootinbib,superscriptaddress,11pt]{revtex4}
% geometry just for the screenshot
\usepackage[paperheight=100mm,paperwidth=210mm]{geometry}

\begin{document}
\title{Blah Blah}
\author{Author 1$^*$}
\author{Author 2$^*$}
\author{Author 3}
\maketitle
\def\thefootnote{*}\footnotetext{These authors contributed equally to this work}\def\thefootnote{\arabic{footnote}}
text text text\footnote{normal footnote}
\end{document}

Result: