Gradings on walled Brauer algebras and Khovanov's arc algebra

We introduce some graded versions of the walled Brauer algebra, working over a field of characteristic zero. This allows us to prove that the walled Brauer algebra is Morita equivalent to an idempotent truncation of a certain infinite dimensional version of Khovanov’s arc algebra, as suggested by recent work of Cox and De Visscher. We deduce that the walled Brauer algebra is Koszul whenever its defining parameter is non-zero.