Figure presents the two-body PMF of bare NPs in the polymer matrix and the corresponding 5 th -order PIPs fit (optimized parameters listed in Table ). As expected, the PMF is fully attractive at distances beyond the excluded zone of NPs (𝑑 > 2𝑅 ?@ = 6𝜎). The depth of the PMF at its minimum is roughly equal to the strength of energetic interactions between the NP cores (𝜀 ?@ = 30𝜀). We also computed the three-body interactions between bare NPs and two example profiles are shown in Fig. . The bare NP exhibits almost zero three-body contributions, even when the NP approaches the dimer from its perpendicular axis (𝑑 4! = 6.12𝜎) (along which the polymer-grafted NPs exhibited the strongest three-body repulsion; see Figs. and). Figure shows the two-body PMF of polymer-grafted NPs at Γ = = 0.4 chains/𝜎 ! with the corresponding 6 th -order PIPs fit (Table ). At this high grafting density, the steric repulsion from the grafts becomes very strong and outweighs the attraction between NP cores, resulting in purely repulsive two-body interactions that exhibit metastability at a distance corresponding to the minimum of the core-core interaction potential. The three-body repulsion also becomes very strong for these NPs (Fig. ). We found that the repulsive two-body interactions were on their own enough to prevent NPs from assembling (Fig. ; see also Fig. ). Since the repulsion keeps NPs well separated, the three-body repulsion experienced by NPs turns out to be very small, as illustrated for the case of a NP approaching a separated NP dimer (𝑑 4! = 10.12𝜎) along its perpendicular axis (Fig. ). These results demonstrate that even though the three-body interactions are large for densely grafted NPs, they do not play a significant role in NPs forming the dispersed phase as the two-body interactions are even more repulsive.