Abstract
The thermal entanglement of spin-1 atoms with nonlinear coupling in an optical lattice chain is investigated for two-particle and multi-particle systems. It is found that the relation between linear coupling and nonlinear coupling is the key to determine thermal entanglement, which shows in what kinds of atoms thermal entanglement exists. This result is true both for two-particle and multi-particle systems. For multi-particle systems, the thermal entanglement does not decrease greatly and the critical temperature decreases only slightly.