On fillable contact structures up to homotopy

Let be a closed, oriented -manifold. The set of homotopy classes of positive, fillable contact structures on is a subtle invariant of , known to always be a finite set. In this paper we study under the assumption that carries metrics with positive scalar curvature. Using Seiberg-Witten gauge theory, we prove that two positive, fillable contact structures on are homotopic if and only if they are homotopic on the complement of a point. This implies that the cardinality of is bounded above by the order of the torsion subgroup of . Using explicit examples we show that without the geometric assumption on such a bound can be arbitrarily far from holding.