An Alternate Approach to the Lie Bracket on Hochschild Cohomology

Abstract

We define Gerstenhaber's graded Lie bracket directly on complexes other than the bar complex, under some conditions. The Koszul complex of a Koszul algebra in particular satisfies our conditions. As examples we recover the Schouten-Nijenhuis bracket for a polynomial ring and the Gerstenhaber bracket for a group algebra of a cyclic group of prime order.