Fractional Hardy inequalities and visibility of the boundary

Abstract: We prove fractional order Hardy inequalities on open sets under a combined fatness and visibility condition on the boundary. We demonstrate by counterexamples that fatness conditions alone are not sufficient for such Hardy inequalities to hold. In addition, we give a short exposition of various fatness conditions related to our main result, and apply fractional Hardy inequalities in connection to the boundedness of extension operators for fractional Sobolev spaces.