<p>You’re making a bigger deal out the USNews UG rankings than you need to. If you want to go to a “top” grad school in physics, your grades, GRE score and letters of recommendation are much more important than where you went to undergrad. (LORs can make or break your app. Good LORs can sometimes overcome so-so GREs. Bad LORs can kill a application with stellar scores/grades.) </p>
<p>UG research is nice. Publication is nice, but no graduate dept seriously expects most undergrad students to have significant research under their belt before coming to grad school. I wouldn’t let that be a determining factor when considering where to transfer to.</p>
<p>You say you want theoretical physics. That’s awfully vague. There are lots of fields and subfields in physics–all of them have theorists working in them. Can you focus down your area of interest just a little? QM? High energy? Astro? Solid state? Biophysics? It would help when making recommendations for schools to look at.</p>
<p>(BTW, the job market for purely theoretical physicists–even with PhDs–is awful…always has been.)</p>