Homotopy liftings and Hochschild cohomology of some twisted tensor products

Abstract: The Hochschild cohomology of a tensor product of algebras is isomorphic to a graded tensor product of Hochschild cohomology algebras, as a Gerstenhaber algebra. A similar result holds when the tensor product is twisted by a bicharacter. We present new proofs of these isomorphisms, using Volkov's homotopy liftings that were introduced for handling Gerstenhaber brackets expressed on arbitrary bimodule resolutions. Our results illustrate the utility of homotopy liftings for theoretical purposes.