  We study a dispersive counterpart of the classical gas dynamics problem of
the interaction of a shock wave with a counter-propagating simple rarefaction
wave often referred to as the shock wave refraction. The refraction of a
one-dimensional dispersive shock wave (DSW) due to its head-on collision with
the centred rarefaction wave (RW) is considered in the framework of defocusing
nonlinear Schr\"odinger (NLS) equation. For the integrable cubic nonlinearity
case we present a full asymptotic description of the DSW refraction by
constructing appropriate exact solutions of the Whitham modulation equations in
Riemann invariants. For the NLS equation with saturable nonlinearity, whose
modulation system does not possess Riemann invariants, we take advantage of the
recently developed method for the DSW description in non-integrable dispersive
systems to obtain main physical parameters of the DSW refraction. The key
features of the DSW-RW interaction predicted by our modulation theory analysis
are confirmed by direct numerical solutions of the full dispersive problem.
