On the pairwise hydrophobic interaction of fullerene

►Results of computer simulations indicate that the water contribution contrasts the pairwise hydrophobic interaction of fullerene molecules. ►The decrease in water accessible surface area upon association causes both a gain in configurational/translational entropy of water molecules and a loss of a significant fraction of fullerene-water attractive energetic interactions. ►The latter term proves to be larger in magnitude than the former because the density of carbon atoms on the fullerene molecular surface is markedly greater than that of normal hydrocarbons.