Failure of the local chain rule for the fractional variation (Q6041139)

Summary: We prove that the local version of the chain rule cannot hold for the fractional variation defined in in our previous article (2019). In the case \(n = 1\), we prove a stronger result, exhibiting a function \(f \in BV^{\alpha} (\mathbb{R})\) such that \(|f| \notin BV^{\alpha} (\mathbb{R})\). The failure of the local chain rule is a consequence of some surprising rigidity properties for non-negative functions with bounded fractional variation which, in turn, are derived from a fractional Hardy inequality localized to half-spaces. Our approach exploits the distributional techniques developed in our previous works (2019--2022). As a byproduct, we refine the fractional Hardy inequality obtained in works of Shieh and Spector (2018) and Spector (2020) and we prove a fractional version of the closely related Meyers-Ziemer trace inequality.