The shape of individual building blocks is an important parameter in bottom-up self-assembly of nanostructured materials. A simple shape change from sphere to spheroid can significantly affect the assembly process due to the modification to the orientational degrees of freedom. When a layer of spheres is placed upon a layer of spheroids, the strain at the interface can be minimized by the spheroid taking a special orientation. C fullerenes represent the smallest spheroids, and their interaction with a sphere-like C is investigated. We find that the orientation of the C within a close-packed C layer can be steered by contacting a layer of C. This orientational steering phenomenon is potentially useful for epitaxial growth of multilayer van der Waals molecular heterostructures.
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