Planar graphs without 5-cycles and intersecting triangles are \((1, 1, 0)\)-colorable (Q898165)

Given nonnegative integers \(c_1,\dots,c_k\), a \((c_1,\dots,c_k)\)-colouring of a graph \(G\) is a partition of its vertex set \(V(G)\) into nonempty subsets \(V_1,\dots,V_k\) such that for every \(i\), \(1\le i\le k\), the subgraph \(G[V_i]\) of \(G\) induced by \(V_i\) has maximum degree at most \(c_i\). This amounts to saying that \(G\) admits a \(k\)-colouring such that each vertex coloured with colour \(i\) has at most \(c_i\) neighbours of the same colour. \textit{L. J. Cowen} et al. [J. Graph Theory 10, No. 2, 187--195 (1986; Zbl 0596.05024)] showed that every planar graph is \((2, 2, 2)\)-colourable, and a result of \textit{Y. Wang} and \textit{L. Xu} [SIAM J. Discrete Math. 27, No. 4, 2029--2037 (2013; Zbl 1291.05077)] implies that every planar graph is \((1, 1, 1)\)-colourable. In addition, the paper [\textit{L. Dai} et al., Discrete Math. 340, No. 9, 2108--2122 (2017; Zbl 1365.05087)] proved that every planar graph is \((1, 1, 0)\)-colourable if it doesn't have 4-cycles or 9-cycles. Let \(d_{\Delta}(G)\) be the length of the shortest path between the vertices of any two 3-cycles in a graph \(G\). The current paper proves that every planar graph with \(d_{\Delta}(G)\ge 1\) and no 4-cycles is \((1,1,0)\)-colourable. A related result of \textit{H. Hoskins} et al. [J. Comb. Optim. 36, No. 2, 346--364 (2018; Zbl 1393.05088)] is that every planar graph is \((2, 0, 0)\)-colourable if it has \(d_{\Delta}(G)\ge 2\) and no 4-cycles.