  The recent discovery of an earth-like planet around Proxima Centauri has
drawn much attention to this star and its environment. We performed a series of
observations of Proxima Centauri using SPHERE, the planet finder instrument
installed at the ESO Very Large Telescope UT3, using its near infrared modules,
IRDIS and IFS. No planet was directly detected but we set upper limits on the
mass up to 7 au exploiting the AMES-COND models. Our IFS observations reveal
that no planet more massive than ~6-7 M Jup can be present within 1 au. The
dual band imaging camera IRDIS also enables us to probe larger separations than
the other techniques like the radial velocity or astrometry. We obtained mass
limits of the order of 4 M Jup at separations of 2 au or larger representing
the most stringent mass limits at separations larger than 5 au available at the
moment. We also did an attempt to estimate the radius of possible planets
around Proxima using the reflected light. Since the residual noise for this
observations are dominated by photon noise and thermal background, longer
exposures in good observing conditions could further improve the achievable
contrast limit.
