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The discovery of quasicrystals 30 years ago challenged our understanding oforder at the atomic scale. While quasicrystals possess long-range orientationalorder they lack translation periodicity. Structurally complex, yet crystallineintermetallics and (bulk) metallic glasses represent competing states ofcondensed matter among metallic phases, including peculiarities like theq-glass. Considerable progress has been made in their structure elucidation andin identifying factors governing their formation; comparatively less is knownabout their interrelation. Moreover, studies bridging the spatial scales fromatoms to the macroscale are scarce. Here we report on the homogeneousnucleation of a single quasicrystalline seed of decagonal symmetry and itscontinuous growth into a tenfold twinned dendritic microstructure.Electrostatic levitation was applied to undercool melts of glass-forming NiZr,observing single crystallization events with a high-speed camera; with astatistical evaluation of 200 consecutive thermal cycles suggesting homogeneousnucleation. The twinned dendritic microstructure, apparent in electronbackscatter diffraction maps, results from the symmetry breaking of anessentially 2D decagonal quasicrystalline cluster. Conserving its long-rangeorientational order, our distortion-free twin model merges a common structuretype for binary intermetallic compounds, with interatomic distances of alikeatoms scaled by the golden ratio, and spiral growth resembling phyllotaxis.NiZr represents a missing link connecting quasicrystals and multiple twinnedstructures sheding light on intermediate states of order between glasses,crystals and their twins, and quasicrystals.

Quasicrystal nucleation in an intermetallic glass-former