It also predicts that a third NP would experience the strongest repulsion when approaching the dimer along the perpendicular axis passing through its center and negligible repulsion when approaching along its longitudinal axis. To visualize the three-body interactions and confirm the goodness of the PIP fit in the remaining dimensions, we plotted similar contour maps with respect to distances 𝑑 4! and 𝑑 4% = 𝑑 !% (Fig. ). We find that the three-body contribution decays rapidly with increasing separation between the dimer NPs.