  We investigate the geometry of a critical system undergoing a second order
thermal phase transition. Using a local description for the dynamics
characterizing the system at the critical point T=Tc, we reveal the formation
of clusters with fractal geometry, where the term cluster is used to describe
regions with a nonvanishing value of the order parameter. We show that,
treating the cluster as an open subsystem of the entire system, new
instanton-like configurations dominate the statistical mechanics of the
cluster. We study the dependence of the resulting fractal dimension on the
embedding dimension and the scaling properties (isothermal critical exponent)
of the system. Taking into account the finite size effects we are able to
calculate the size of the critical cluster in terms of the total size of the
system, the critical temperature and the effective coupling of the long
wavelength interaction at the critical point. We also show that the size of the
cluster has to be identified with the correlation length at criticality.
Finally, within the framework of the mean field approximation, we extend our
local considerations to obtain a global description of the system.
