Non-existence of Taylor expansion in time due to cusps

In the usual treatment of electronic structure, all matter has cusps in the electronic density at nuclei. Cusps can produce non-analytic behavior in time, even in response to perturbations that are time-analytic. We analyze these non-analyticities in a simple case from many perspectives. We describe a method, the s-expansion, that can be used in several such cases, and illustrate it with a variety of examples. These include both the sudden appearance of electric fields and disappearance of nuclei, in both one and three dimensions. When successful, the s-expansion yields the dominant short-time behavior, no matter how strong the external electric field, but agrees with linear response theory in the weak limit. We discuss the relevance of these results to time-dependent density functional theory.