Obstructions to nonnegative curvature and rational homotopy theory

We establish a link between rational homotopy theory and the problem which vector bundles admit a complete Riemannian metric of nonnegative sectional curvature. As an application, we show for a large class of simply-connected nonnegatively curved manifolds that, if lies in the class and is a torus of positive dimension, then ``most' vector bundles over admit no complete nonnegatively curved metrics.