Abstract
We investigate the existence and stability properties of nonlinearly chirped solitary waves on a continuous-wave background in nonlinear metamaterials with higher-order effects such as pseudo-quintic nonlinearity and self-steepening effect. Novel classes of chirped gray solitary pulses (dark pulses with nonzero minimum intensity) are derived by employing the traveling-wave method. The conditions for the formation of these localized pulses as well as the nonlinear chirp associated to them are presented. The stability of the obtained structures is also demonstrated numerically under finite initial perturbations. The results show that the envelope pulses obtained here represent new types of extremely robust nonlinear chirped structures in highly nonlinear metamaterials.