Quantifying energy condition violations in traversable wormholes

The ‘theoretical’ existence of traversable Lorentzian wormholes in the classical, macroscopic world is plagued by the violation of the well-known energy conditions of general relativity. In this brief article we show: (i) how the extent of violation can be quantified using certain volume integrals and (ii) whether this ‘amount of violation’ can be minimised for some specific cut-and-paste geometric constructions. Examples and possibilities are also outlined.