“…QCD sum rules proved to be a most powerful non-perturbative method in studying the ground state hadrons and it has been widely used to analyze the masses, decay constants, form factors and strong coupling constants, etc [45,46]. There have been many reports about its applications to the ground state with spin-parity J P C = 0 ± , 1 ± , 2 + , 3 − mesons [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54], while efforts on the excited states are few [55,56]. In this article, we assign the ρ(2000) and φ(2170) as the first radially excited states of D-wave vector ρ and φ mesons, study their masses and decay constants with the full QCD sum rules in detail.…”