  Efficient algorithms are presented for constructing spanners in geometric
intersection graphs. For a unit ball graph in R^k, a (1+\epsilon)-spanner is
obtained using efficient partitioning of the space into hypercubes and solving
bichromatic closest pair problems. The spanner construction has almost
equivalent complexity to the construction of Euclidean minimum spanning trees.
The results are extended to arbitrary ball graphs with a sub-quadratic running
time.
  For unit ball graphs, the spanners have a small separator decomposition which
can be used to obtain efficient algorithms for approximating proximity problems
like diameter and distance queries. The results on compressed quadtrees,
geometric graph separators, and diameter approximation might be of independent
interest.
