  We investigate the thermal entanglement characteristics of three
dipole-coupled two-level atoms arranged in two different configurations - in a
line with nearest neighbour coupling and in a closed loop with each atom
interacting with both its neighbours. It is observed that in loop
configuration, any one of the three atoms is indeed entangled with the other
two atoms in the system, which are not mutually entangled, and further that
this feature is specific to only the loop configuration, which is markedly
absent in the line configuration. A detailed study of the quantum correlations
demonstrated how these can be tuned by varying the temperature and the dipole
dipole coupling strength, in both the configurations.
