We present an interesting relationship between the orthogonality catastrophe (OC) and the quantum speed limit (QSL) for a spin chain with uniform nearest neighbour couplings perturbed by an impurity spin. We thoroughly study the catastrophic QSL that specifies a bound on the evolution time between the initial and final states and in this respect, link it to the emerging OC effect. It is found that the speed of state evolution subtle but fundamental, and the bound characterized by QSL shows the same behaviours as the OC effect in the thermodynamic limit. It allows us to reveal some universal properties, in particular finite temperature effects. Significantly, the threshold of temperature and system size is clearly demonstrated for the QSL under finite temperature.

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The orthogonality catastrophe (OC) of quantum many-body systems is an important phenomenon in condensed matter physics. Recently, an interesting relationship between the OC and the quantum speed limit was shown [Phys.Rev.Lett.124,110601 (2020)]. Inspired by the remarkable feature, we provide a quantitative version of the quantum average speed as another different method to investigate the measure of how it close to the OC dynamics. We analyze the properties of an impurity qubit embedded into an isotropic Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick spin model, and show that the OC dynamics can also be characterized by the average speed of the evolution state. Furthermore, a similar behavior of the actual speed of quantum evolution and the theoretical maximal rate is shown which can provide an alternative speed-up protocol allowing us to understand some universal properties characterized by the quantum speed limit.