Constructing collars in paracompact Hausdorff spaces and Lipschitz estimates

Abstract: We give a constructive proof for the following new collar theorem: every locally collared closed set that is paracompact in a Hausdorff space is collared. This includes the important special case of locally collared closed sets in paracompact Hausdorff spaces. Importantly, we use Stone's result that every open cover of a paracompact space has an open locally finite refinement which is the countable union of discrete families. Furthermore, in the LIP category, our construction yields collars that are locally bi-Lipschitz embeddings. If the initial data satisfy uniform estimates, then this collar is even bi-Lipschitz onto its image and we explicitly bound the constants. We also provide partitions of unity whose Lipschitz constants are bounded by the Lebesgue constant and the order of the cover.