  The direct imaging of rocky exoplanets is one of the major science goals for
upcoming large telescopes. The contrast requirement for imaging such planets is
challenging. However, the mid-IR (InfraRed) regime provides the optimum
contrast to directly detect the thermal signatures of exoplanets in our solar
neighbourhood. We aim to exploit novel fast chopping techniques newly developed
for astronomy with the aid of adaptive optics to look for thermal signatures of
exoplanets around bright stars in the solar neighbourhood. We use the upgraded
VISIR (Very Large Telescope Imager and Spectrometer for the mid-InfraRed)
instrument with high contrast imaging (HCI) capability optimized for
observations at 10~$\mu$m to look for exoplanets around five nearby ($d$ < 4
pc) stars. The instrument provides an improved signal-to-noise (S/N) by a
factor of $\sim$4 in the N-band compared to standard VISIR for a given S/N and
time. In this work we achieve a detection sensitivity of sub-mJy, which is
sufficient to detect few Jupiter mass planets in nearby systems. Although no
detections are made we achieve most sensitive limits within $<2''$ for all the
observed targets compared to previous campaigns. For $\epsilon$ Indi A and
$\epsilon$ Eri we achieve detection limits very close to the giant planets
discovered by RV, with the limits on $\epsilon$ Indi A being the most sensitive
to date. Our non-detection therefore supports an older age for $\epsilon$ Indi
A. The results presented here show the promise for high contrast imaging and
exoplanet detections in the mid-IR regime.
