Spherically symmetric thin-shell wormholes in the presence of a cosmological
constant are constructed applying the cut-and-paste technique implemented by
Visser. Using the Darmois-Israel formalism the surface stresses, which are
concentrated at the wormhole throat, are determined. This construction allows
one to apply a dynamical analysis to the throat, considering linearized radial
perturbations around static solutions. For a large positive cosmological
constant, i.e., for the Schwarzschild-de Sitter solution, the region of
stability is significantly increased, relatively to the null cosmological
constant case, analyzed by Poisson and Visser. With a negative cosmological
constant, i.e., the Schwarzschild-anti de Sitter solution, the region of
stability is decreased. In particular, considering static solutions with a
generic cosmological constant, the weak and dominant energy conditions are
violated, while for a0≤3M the null and strong energy conditions are
satisfied. The surface pressure of the static solution is strictly positive for
the Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild-anti de Sitter spacetimes, but takes
negative values, assuming a surface tension in the Schwarzschild-de Sitter
solution, for high values of the cosmological constant and the wormhole throat
radius.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, LaTeX2e, IOP style files. Accepted for
publication in Classical and Quantum Gravit