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The direct imaging of rocky exoplanets is one of the major science goals forupcoming large telescopes. The contrast requirement for imaging such planets ischallenging. However, the mid-IR (InfraRed) regime provides the optimumcontrast to directly detect the thermal signatures of exoplanets in our solarneighbourhood. We aim to exploit novel fast chopping techniques newly developedfor astronomy with the aid of adaptive optics to look for thermal signatures ofexoplanets around bright stars in the solar neighbourhood. We use the upgradedVISIR (Very Large Telescope Imager and Spectrometer for the mid-InfraRed)instrument with high contrast imaging (HCI) capability optimized forobservations at 10~$\mu$m to look for exoplanets around five nearby ($d$ < 4pc) stars. The instrument provides an improved signal-to-noise (S/N) by afactor of $\sim$4 in the N-band compared to standard VISIR for a given S/N andtime. In this work we achieve a detection sensitivity of sub-mJy, which issufficient to detect few Jupiter mass planets in nearby systems. Although nodetections are made we achieve most sensitive limits within $<2''$ for all theobserved targets compared to previous campaigns. For $\epsilon$ Indi A and$\epsilon$ Eri we achieve detection limits very close to the giant planetsdiscovered by RV, with the limits on $\epsilon$ Indi A being the most sensitiveto date. Our non-detection therefore supports an older age for $\epsilon$ IndiA. The results presented here show the promise for high contrast imaging andexoplanet detections in the mid-IR regime.

High contrast imaging at 10 microns, a search for exoplanets around: Eps Indi A, Eps Eri, Tau Ceti, Sirius A and Sirius B