Geometric frustration describes the inability of a local moleculararrangement, such as icosahedra found in metallic glasses and in model atomicglass-formers, to tile space. Local icosahedral order however is stronglyfrustrated in Euclidean space, which obscures any causal relationship with theobserved dynamical slowdown. Here we relieve frustration in a modelglass-forming liquid by curving 3-dimensional space onto the surface of a4-dimensional hypersphere. For sufficient curvature, frustration vanishes andthe liquid freezes in a fully icosahedral structure via a sharp `transition'.Frustration increases upon reducing the curvature, and the transition to theicosahedral state smoothens while glassy dynamics emerges. Decreasing thecurvature leads to decoupling between dynamical and structural length scalesand the decrease of kinetic fragility. This sheds light on the observedglass-forming behavior in the Euclidean space.
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