  We study the equilibration of isospin degree of freedom in intermediate
energy heavy-ion collisions using an isospin-dependent BUU model. It is found
that there exists a transition from the isospin equilibration at low energies
to non-equilibration at high energies as the beam energy varies across the
Fermi energy in central, asymmetric heavy-ion collisions. At beam energies
around 55 MeV/nucleon, the composite system in thermal equilibrium but isospin
non-equilibrium breaks up into two primary hot residues with N/Z ratios closely
related to those of the target and projectile respectively. The decay of these
forward-backward moving residues results in the strong isospin asymmetry in
space and the dependence of the isotopic composition of fragments on the N/Z
ratios of the target and projectile. These features are in good agreement with
those found recently in experiments at NSCL/MSU and TAMU, implications of these
findings are discussed.
