Gradings on walled Brauer algebras and Khovanov's arc algebra (Q452043)

The walled Brauer algebra is a certain subalgebra of the classical Brauer algebra which appears on the right hand side of the Schur-Weyl duality for the action of the general linear group on a mixed tensor space that involves both powers of the natural representation and its dual. The algebra depends on three parameters, which describe the exponent of the natural representation, the exponent of its dual, and the Brauer parameter \(\delta\). In this paper the authors introduce \(\mathbb{Z}\)-graded versions of walled Brauer algebras over a field of characteristic zero. This is used to show that the walled Brauer algebra is Morita equivalent to an idempotent truncation of a certain infinite dimensional version of Khovanov's arc algebra. As an application, it is shown that the walled Brauer algebra is Koszul whenever the defining parameter \(\delta\) is non-zero.