  Supercooled liquids are kinetically trapped materials in which the transition
to a thermodynamically more stable state with long-range order is strongly
suppressed. To assess the glass-forming abilities of a liquid empirical rules
exist, but a comprehensive microscopic picture of devitrification is still
missing. Here we study the crystallization of a popular model glass former, the
binary Kob-Andersen mixture, in small systems. We perform trajectory sampling
employing the population of the locally favored structure as order parameter.
While for large population a dynamical phase transition has been reported, here
we show that biasing towards a small population of locally favored structures
induces crystallization, and we estimate the free energy difference. This
result sheds new light on the competition between local and global structure in
glass-forming liquids and its implications for crystallization.
