Universal behavior in the parametric evolution of chaotic saddles

Chaotic saddles are nonattracting dynamical invariant sets that physically lead to transient chaos. As a system parameter changes, chaotic saddles can evolve via an infinite number of homoclinic or heteroclinic tangencies of their stable and unstable manifolds. Based on previous numerical evidence and a rigorous analysis of a class of representative models, we show that dynamical invariants such as the topological entropy and the fractal dimension of chaotic saddles obey a universal behavior: they exhibit a devil-staircase characteristic as a function of the system parameter.