D-particle-inspired analysis of localization limits in quantum gravity

Some recent studies of the properties of D-particles suggest that in string theory a rather conventional description of spacetime might be available up to scales that are significantly smaller than the Planck length. We explore this possibility in the framework of a Heisenberg-microscope setup for the analysis of localization of a spacetime event marked by the collision of two D-particles. For the string-theory aspects of our analysis, which only concern some general properties of D-particles, we rely on previous works. The results confirm that a spatial coordinate of the event can indeed be determined with better-than-Planckian accuracy, but we stress that this comes at the price of a rather large uncertainty in the time coordinate. We comment on the implications of these results for the popular quantum-gravity intuition which assigns to the Planck length the role of absolute limit on localization