  Traditional studies of chaos in conservative and driven dissipative systems
have established a correspondence between sensitive dependence on initial
conditions and fractal basin boundaries, but much less is known about the
relation between geometry and dynamics in undriven dissipative systems. These
systems can exhibit a prevalent form of complex dynamics, dubbed doubly
transient chaos because not only typical trajectories but also the (otherwise
invariant) chaotic saddles are transient. This property, along with a manifest
lack of scale invariance, has hindered the study of the geometric properties of
basin boundaries in these systems--most remarkably, the very question of
whether they are fractal across all scales has yet to be answered. Here we
derive a general dynamical condition that answers this question, which we use
to demonstrate that the basin boundaries can indeed form a true fractal; in
fact, they do so generically in a broad class of transiently chaotic undriven
dissipative systems. Using physical examples, we demonstrate that the
boundaries typically form a slim fractal, which we define as a set whose
dimension at a given resolution decreases when the resolution is increased. To
properly characterize such sets, we introduce the notion of equivalent
dimension for quantifying their relation with sensitive dependence on initial
conditions at all scales. We show that slim fractal boundaries can exhibit
complex geometry even when they do not form a true fractal and fractal scaling
is observed only above a certain length scale at each boundary point. Thus, our
results reveal slim fractals as a geometrical hallmark of transient chaos in
undriven dissipative systems.
