Exotic $\mathbb{R}^4$'s and positive isotropic curvature

Abstract

We show that no exotic $\mathbb{R}^4$ admits a complete Riemannian metric with uniformly positive isotropic curvature and with bounded geometry. This is essentially a corollary of the main result in [Hu1], and was stated in [Hu2] without proof. In the process of the proof we also show that the diffeomorphism type of an infinite connected sum of some connected smooth $n$-manifolds ($n\geq 2$) according to a locally finite graph does not depend on the gluing maps used.