Isospectral connections, ergodicity of frame flows, and polynomial maps between spheres

We show that on closed negatively curved Riemannian manifolds with simple length spectrum, the spectrum of the Bochner Laplacian determines both the isomorphism class of the vector bundle and the connection up to gauge under a low-rank assumption. We also show that flows of frames on low-rank frame bundles extending the geodesic flow in negative curvature are ergodic whenever the bundle admits no holonomy reduction. This is achieved by exhibiting a link between these problems and the classification of polynomial maps between spheres in real algebraic geometry.