Exotic spheres with positive Ricci curvature (Q1383660)

The author considers the group \(bP_m\) of diffeomorphism classes of homotopy spheres bounding parallelisable manifolds of dimension \(m\) under the connected sum operation. Before this article, it was an open question whether all such homotopy spheres admit Ricci positive metrics. The main result is the following: ``Homotopy spheres which bound parallelisable manifolds admit metrics of positive Ricci curvature,'' and it follows as a corollary of a more general result which states that certain manifolds arising from a construction known as ``plumbing'' admit Ricci positive metrics.