The influence of baseline severity on the efficacy of Silexan, a proprietary essential oil from Lavandula angustifolia, in anxiety disorders has not been investigated in a pooled dataset. We report on an individual patient data analysis of all five double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trials with Silexan in anxiety disorders. Eligible participants received Silexan 80 mg/d or placebo for 10 weeks. Analyses were based on the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAMA), its psychic and somatic anxiety subscores, and the Clinical Global Impressions (CGI) scale. To correlate baseline severity with outcome, patients were segregated into mild, moderate, and severe cases. Altogether 1,172 patients (Silexan, n = 587; placebo, n = 585) were analyzed. For the HAMA total score, we found a significant association between the score at baseline and the treatment effect of Silexan versus placebo at week 10 (p < 0.001). HAMA items from the somatic domain scored lower at baseline and showed less improvement than items from the psychic domain, particularly in patients with mild or moderate baseline symptoms. For CGI item 2 (global improvement), significant efficacy favoring Silexan were observed in mild, moderate, and severe baseline symptom severity. Although significant improvements were found for all subsets, the more severe the initial symptoms, the greater the treatment effects documented by the HAMA. Overall this analysis confirms that Silexan is an effective treatment option in early or mild stages of anxiety disorder. Given its favorable safety profile, Silexan can thus fill a therapeutic gap in the treatment of (subsyndromal) anxiety disorders.

Until now, just a few extrasolar planets (30 out of 860) have been found through the direct imaging method. This number should greatly improve when the next generation of High Contrast Instruments like Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) at Gemini South Telescope or SPHERE at VLT will became operative at the end of this year. In particular, the Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS), one of the SPHERE subsystems, should allow a first characterization of the spectral type of the found extrasolar planets. Here we present the results of the last performance tests that we have done on the IFS instrument at the Institut de Planetologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG) in condition as similar as possible to the ones that we will find at the telescope. We have found that we should be able to reach contrast down to 5 × 10−7 and make astrometry at sub-mas level with the instrument in the actual conditions. A number of critical issues have been identified. The resolution of these problems could allow to further improve the performance of the instrument.

The Apodizing Phase Plate (APP) coronagraph has been used to image the exoplanet β Pictoris b and the protoplanet candidate around HD 100546, and is currently in use in surveys with NaCo at the VLT. Its success is due to its tolerance to tip-tilt pointing errors in current AO systems, which degrade the performance of nearly all other coronagraphs. Currently the sensitivity of the APP is limited by non-common path errors in the science camera systems and by its chromatic behaviour. We present the achromatized Vector APP coronagraph and address how we will measure and minimise non-common path errors with Focal Plane Wavefront Sensing algorithms.

Early design studies for the future Exo-Planet Imaging Camera and Specrotgraph (EPICS) on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) show the ability to probe the region of super-Earths in the habitable zone of stars within 5pc (including Gilese 581d). However, these planets will be lost to us if the correct choice of integral field spectrograph (IFS) technology is not selected for such an instrument the ability to fit and remove the speckle noise that remains is crucial to reaching these contrasts.

We conclusively demonstrate, though the use of an experimental setup producing an artificial speckle, that slicer based IFSs and post-processing using spectral deconvolution can achieve speckle rejection factors exceeding 103. Contrary to popular belief, we do not find any evidence that this choice of IFS technology limits the achievable contrast. Coupled with extreme adaptive optics and high performance coronographs, a slicer based integral field spectrograph could achieve contrasts exceeding 109, enabling these super-Earths to be detected in the habitable zone of nearby stars, making it an attractive option for the next generation of instruments being designed for the direct detection of extra solar planets.

EPICS is the proposed planet finder for the European Extremely Large Telescope. EPICS is a high contrast imager based on a high performing extreme adaptive optics system, a diffraction suppression module, and two scientific instruments: an Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS) for the near infrared (0.95-1.65 μm), and a differential polarization imager (E-POL). Both these instruments should allow imaging and characterization of planets shining in reflected light, possibly down to Earth-size. A few high interesting science cases are presented.

The β Pic disk of dust and gas has been regarded as the prototype of young planetary systems since the 1980s and has revealed over the years an impressive amount of indirect signs pointing toward the presence of at least one giant planet. We present here the recently detected first giant planet around this star. We show how this planet could explain some very peculiar features of the star environment (disk, spectroscopic variability), and how it constrains the scenarios of planetary system formation (timescales, mechanisms).

Adaptive Optics (AO) will be essential for accomplishing many, if not most, of the science objectives currently planned for Extremely Large Telescopes including GMT, OWL, and TMT. AO will be needed to support a range of instrumentation, including near infrared (IR) imagers and spectrometers, mid IR imagers and spectrometers, “planet finding” instrumentation and wide-field optical spectrographs. Multiple advanced AO systems, utilizing the full range of concepts currently under development, will need to be combined into an integrated architecture to meet a broad range of requirements for field-of-view, spatial resolution and spectral bandpass.

In this paper, we describe several of the possible options for these systems and outline the range of issues, trade studies and component development activities which must be addressed. Some of these challenges include very high-order, large-stroke wavefront correction, tip-tilt sensing with faint natural guide stars to maximize sky coverage, laser guide star wavefront sensing on a very large aperture and achieving extremely high contrast ratios for the detection of extra-solar planet and other faint companions of nearby bright stars.

The European southern observatory ESO is currently undertaking the ambitious task of building a “Planet Finder” instrument for the VLT. The concept for this instrument includes a 3D spectroscopic imager assisted by a very powerful eXtreme AO system. In one of the two phase-A studies for this project, we have developed a simulation software for this kind of instrument which has now been extended and applied to the case of various ELTs. In this presentation, we give results of simulations and discuss achievable signal to noise ratios and prospects for detection and characterization from young gas giants down to terrestrial type planets. ELTs of various diameters are considered as well as a set of environmental conditions.