Partition subcubic planar graphs into independent sets

A packing (1^, 2ᵏ) -coloring of a graph G is a partition of V (G) into independent sets and k 2-independent sets (whose pairwise vertex distance is at least 3). The famous Four Color Theorem, proved by Appel and Haken as well as Robertson et al. , shows that every planar graph is 4-colorable, i. e. , every planar graph is packing (1⁴) -colorable. The square coloring of planar graphs was first studied by Wegner in 1977. Thomassen, and independently Hartke et al. proved one can always square color a cubic planar graph with 7 colors, i. e. , every subcubic planar graph is packing (2⁷) -colorable. We focus on packing (1^, 2ᵏ) -colorings, which lie between proper coloring and square coloring. Gastineau and Togni proved every subcubic graph is packing (1, 2⁶) -colorable. Furthermore, they asked whether every subcubic graph except the Petersen graph is packing (1, 2⁵) -colorable. In this paper, we prove that every subcubic planar graph is packing (1, 2⁵) -colorable, extending the result of Thomassen and Hartke et al. . This also answers the question of Gastineau and Togni affirmatively for subcubic planar graphs. Moreover, we prove that there exists an infinite family of subcubic planar graphs that are not packing (1, 2⁴) -colorable, which shows that our result is the best possible. Besides, our result is also sharp in the sense that the disjoint union of Petersen graphs is subcubic and non-planar, but not packing (1, 2⁵) -colorable.