Morita equivalence for rings with involution (Q1819188)

Morita equivalence is developed here for idempotent and non-degenerate (not necessarily unital) rings with involution by means of dual pairs and inner-product modules. Here idempotence of a ring means that every element can be written as a sum of products, and non-degenerate means that no element annihilates the ring on either side. The main result of the paper shows that Morita equivalence of two rings with involution is always induced by the ring of finite rank operators of a full inner-product bimodule over them. It is also shown that Morita *-equivalence reduces to *-isomorphism for commutative rings with involution.