Page-wide figures in two-column articles

Here's the problem I had:

I was writing an article for Phys. Rev. Lett. using APS' RevTeX 4.1 package.
I needed to include a figure that required the full two-column space.

Solution:

I used the \begin{figure*} ... \end{figure*} environment.
The other possibility is to enclose the standard figure environment into the widetext one.
The latter is usually adopted for including math environments with very long equations that
cannot be contained in a single column space, unless being cut.
The disadvantage of the widetext environment is that it breaks the two-column layout with a couple of horizontal lines showing where the full page part begins and ends.

Better to use the figure* environment.