System analysis and characterization of the FFREE bench

Detection of exoplanets implies the measure of extremely weak signals, usually below intensity perturbations in the PSF caused by static aberrations. We have finished the construction of a new test bench called FFREE - Fresnel Free Experiment for EPICS. The scope of the FFREE experiment is the active speckles correction using off-line cancellation techniques: Electric Field Conjugation and Phase Diversity, in view of a future instrument EPICS for the telescope EELT (ESO). We will describe the system and discuss some characteristics like the chromatism and the environmental stability of the bench.