  We report a molecular dynamics simulation of a supercooled simple monatomic
glass-forming liquid. It is found that the onset of the supercooled regime
results in formation of distinct domains of slow diffusion which are confined
to the long-lived icosahedrally structured clusters associated with deeper
minima in the energy landscape. As these domains, possessing a low-dimensional
geometry, grow with cooling and percolate below $T_c$, the critical temperature
of the mode coupling theory, a sharp slowing down of the structural relaxation
relative to diffusion is observed. It is concluded that this latter anomaly
cannot be accounted for by the spatial variation in atomic mobility; instead,
we explain it as a direct result of the configuration-space constraints imposed
by the transient structural correlations. We also conjecture that the observed
tendency for low-dimensional clustering may be regarded as a possible mechanism
of fragility.
