Cellular algebras have recently been introduced by Graham and Lehrer
[5, 6] as a convenient axiomatization of all of the following
algebras, each of them containing
information on certain classical algebraic or finite groups: group algebras of
symmetric groups in any characteristic, Hecke algebras of type A or B (or more
generally, Ariki Koike algebras), Brauer algebras, Temperley–Lieb algebras,
(q-)Schur algebras, and so on. The problem of determining a parameter set for, or
even constructing bases of simple modules, is in this way reduced (but of course not
solved in general) to questions of linear algebra.
The present paper has two aims. First, we make explicit an inductive construction
of cellular algebras which has as input data of linear algebra, and which in fact
produces all cellular algebras (but no other ones). This is what we call ‘inflation’. This
construction also exhibits close relations between several of the above algebras, as can
be seen from the computations in [6]. Among the consequences of the construction
is a natural way of generalizing Hochschild cohomology. Another consequence is the
construction of certain idempotents which is used in the second part of the paper.
The second aim is to study Morita equivalences of cellular algebras. Since the
input of many of the constructions of representation theory of finite-dimensional
algebras is a basic algebra, it is useful to know whether any finite-dimensional cellular
algebra is Morita equivalent to a basic one by a Morita equivalence that preserves the
cellular structure. It turns out that the answer is ‘yes’ if the underlying field has
characteristic other than 2. However, there are counterexamples in the case of
characteristic 2, or more generally for any ring in which 2 is not invertible. This also
tells us that the notion of ‘cellular’ cannot be defined only in terms of the module
category. However, in any characteristic we find some useful Morita equivalences
which are compatible with cellular structures.