Beyond the bounce: multiple tidal sign reversals and turning-point bifurcations in multi-horizon black holes

Abstract We investigate the radial motion and tidal forces experienced by neutral test particles in multi-horizon black hole solutions arising from Einstein gravity coupled to nonlinear electrodynamics (NED). Focusing on the three- and four-horizon configurations, we examine how nonlinear electromagnetic corrections modify the causal structure, radial geodesic motion, and tidal-force profiles in comparison with the Schwarzschild and Reissner–Nordström (R–N) spacetimes. Our analysis shows that the NED field gives rise to multiple zero crossings in both the radial and angular tidal-force components, leading to successive transitions between stretching and compressive tidal regimes. More importantly, the radial equation of motion contains classically forbidden regions bounded by bounce-back points. For the class of trajectories considered in this work, these forbidden regions prevent particles from entering the spacetime domain where the tidal forces become divergent. In the super-extremal regime admitted by these solutions, the forbidden region may extend beyond the event horizon, preventing particles released from rest at sufficiently large distances from crossing the horizon. We further identify a systematic ordering of the critical charge values associated with the appearance of tidal-force zero crossings, additional horizons, and bounce-back points. For both the three- and four-horizon configurations, these critical values satisfy a hierarchical ordering, indicating that changes in the tidal-force structure precede the corresponding modifications of the horizon configuration. These results demonstrate that nonlinear electrodynamics can substantially modify the classical dynamics of neutral particles in multi-horizon black hole spacetimes through the combined effects of forbidden regions, multiple tidal transitions, and changes in the horizon structure.