We have studied the mass spectra of the P-wave fully charm and fully bottom tetraquark states in the framework of QCD sum rules. We construct the interpolating currents by inserting the covariant derivative operator $\overset{ \leftrightarrow } { \mathcal D }_{ \mu }$ between the S-wave diquark and antidiquark fields. The excitation structures show that the pure $\lambda$-mode excited P-wave fully heavy tetraquarks exist for the quantum numbers $J^{PC}=1^{--}, 1^{-+}, 2^{--}, 2^{-+}$ and $3^{--}$, while it is difficult to separate the $\lambda$-mode and $\rho$-mode excitations in the $0^{-+}$ channel. Within three Lorentz indices, there is no pure $\lambda$-mode excited P-wave fully charm/bottom tetraquark operators with $J^{PC}=0^{--}$ and $3^{-+}$. Our results support that the recent observed $X(6900)$ and $X(7200)$ resonances could be interpreted as the P-wave fully charm $cc \bar c \bar c$ tetraquark states with $J^{PC}=1^{-+}$ and $2^{-+}$, respectively. Some P-wave fully bottom $bb\bar b\bar b$ tetraquark states are predicted to be lower than the di-$\eta_b(1S)$ and di-$\Upsilon(1S)$ mass thresholds. Hopefully our calculations will be useful for identifying the nature of new exotic tetraquark states.
Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures. Accepted by Physical Review D